


first is epsilon

by snapchat



Category: JBJ (Band), NU'EST, Produce 101 (TV), Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Donghan makes the smallest cameo known to mankind, Jisung is there, M/M, Minor Hwang Minhyun/Kim Jonghyun | JR, Minor Kang Daniel/Ong Seongwoo, Minor Kim Sanggyun | A-Tom/Takada Kenta - Freeform, Parallel Universes, Technologically Engineered Worlds, san junipero au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-14 21:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13598721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snapchat/pseuds/snapchat
Summary: 'Where am I?''Take a look around, newbie.' The grin fades ever-so-slightly, sobers into something nondescript. 'You’re not in dingy old Seoul anymore. Congrats on ditching the Apocalypse.''Holy shit,' Jaehwan whispers to himself. 'Is this—''You bet your ass it is.' The stranger’s grin widens. 'Welcome to XSeoul.'





	first is epsilon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galacticnik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticnik/gifts).



> Due to the nature of the AU, please note that 'Major Character Death' more literally implies existence in one world at the expense of existing in another. The hospital setting is utilized extensively but no characters are terminally or medically ill.
> 
> [♫](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC6tPEaAiYU) Song referenced throughout (English lyrics are translated roughly)   
>  [★](https://78.media.tumblr.com/40aef809bcb73972fedb516bb5e8b9d4/tumblr_p4qa9yntdz1x62wm2o1_1280.png) Terms used throughout (please don't read until you actually encounter said terms!)
> 
> _Title from 'Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos' by Michio Kaku_   
> 

**[STATIC]**

_“The XSeoul Project was the first of its kind, a technological, digital reality initially engineered to boost morale of the South Korean people… Over time, the project accomplished many things beyond the Developers’ expectations—to the extent that there are people living sustainable lives in a world entirely unlike our own. As the city of Seoul leads South Korea in trailblazing our nation-wide recovery and the XSeoul Project comes to a permanent end, we would like to encourage the citizens of accessible cities to explore their options before they cease to exist…”_

**[STATIC]**

_“Thank you to XSeoul for providing a glimpse of the city Seoul ought to be.”_

**[CLICK]**

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

“Mister Kim Jaehwan,” the nurse addresses him from the door of his supposed-to-be-shared but very empty hospital room. “Have you already been linked up?”

“Apparently,” Jaehwan replies with a yawn. He stretches his arms above his head, cracks his neck once and then twice for good measure. “Does it hurt? I’ve heard some rumors.”

“Rumors?” His nurse cracks a smile. “Who’d you hear them from?”

“That kid down the hall.” Jaehwan pauses, tries to remember his name. Seonhwan? Seongjun? Seonlin? “Seonho?” 

“Seonho,” comes the exasperated response, “just deals with his boredom by terrorizing his neighbors. He’s a kid. Don’t mind him.” 

“Well? You still haven’t told me if it hurts.” 

Jaehwan’s respectably fond of his nurse. He’s fond of everyone he’s met so far at the hospital—which is weird, because he figures there’s always been a stigma surrounding hospitals since he was a kid: indomitable fortresses and something akin to the morgue. Things are changing, he supposes. Steadily but surely, Seoul’s been building itself back up and the hospital, these days, has been abuzz with a strange new sort of light, especially with leaps and bounds in once-controversial technology. 

He hadn’t been planning on dabbling in it, himself, thoroughly content with leading a life as a near-hermit seeking the meaning of life (or something). But he’d been shuffled aside during a routine check-up for _cloud cough_ by three men in white lab coats and asked, in a room that might as well have been a coat closet, _“How would you like to see a perfect world?”_

And there’s really no way to say _”No thanks!”_ to an offer like that.

“It won’t hurt,” comes the nurse's steady response. An off-beat silence follows and Jaehwan almost misses the brief look of consternation on the other’s face. He fiddles with the knob of a beat-up radio and Jaehwan braces himself for yet another glimpse of his nurse’s strange music taste. 

It’s the same song as always. He hears it at least three times during every check-up. 

_I’m always awkward with my mother’s unconditional love…_

“You promise?” Jaehwan says with a crooked smile. 

_Maybe that’s why things always seem so hard…_

“Promise.” He gets a grin in response, something somber and unspoken tangled into it that he doesn’t have the time to pry apart. “The only hard part about visiting is saying goodbye.”

_But there’s something beautiful even within the greed I was afraid of losing…_

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Jaehwan wakes up to a foot in his face. 

“What the fuck are you doing on the beach at this hour?”

Oh, and a lovely greeting, too. 

It takes those two things to snap him into—for lack of a better word—consciousness. 

Suddenly, everything becomes drastically realer. It’s a strange way of putting things but he isn’t sure how else to express the vivid _tangibility_ of the world around him. It hits him in an instant. He goes from feeling numbness in a sea of black to spitting grains of rock out of his mouth.

The sand he’s sprawled out on pushes at his flesh in tiny grain-sized ridges and the gentle hum of the ocean waves jostles Jaehwan to his senses. There’s a heaviness to his limbs, to his eyelids—like he’s waking up from a too-long nap. 

He heaves his torso up, elbows digging into the sand with much futility. 

“What,” he groans, sinking. “Who the hell are you?” 

The owner of the leather-soled foot once dangled in his face ducks down, offensively charming face hovering just centimeters away from Jaehwan’s. There’s a deep-seated curiosity bubbling in the stranger’s gaze and it takes a split second before his lips curve into an unrelenting smile.

“You’re new here,” the guy declares. He laughs this time, too loudly. “Holy shit, you’re _new_ here.”

Jaehwan grimaces when the ache in his muscles settles in all at once. “Where am I?” 

He gets another laugh—not helpful—and then the stranger straightens up, throwing his arms up into a stretch before folding them behind the back of his head. “Take a look around, newbie.” The grin fades ever-so-slightly, sobers into something nondescript. “You’re not in dingy old Seoul anymore. Congrats on ditching the Apocalypse.”

It takes a second before Jaehwan manages to really, sincerely drink in the sheer sight of his surroundings. 

He’s on a beach (a _beach_ ) where the only visible litter he can make out consists of dented cans of _Cass_ and shiny fliers for miscellaneous restaurants and other less orthodox businesses. Just feet away, there’s a skyline—glittering, bold, unrestrained—that he’s only seen in history books.

Where there should be gray skies and barbed wire fences blocking off the shore—a shore lined with toxic waste bins—from pedestrians, there’s a living breathing city that Jaehwan _knows_ is too good to be true. 

Since youth, he’s tried to make it a habit not to curse—

“Holy shit,” Jaehwan whispers to himself. "Wait, is this—"

(But some habits are hard not to break.)

"You bet your ass it is." The stranger’s grin widens. He twirls his arm with a flourish, dips into a wholehearted bow as he says, with exaggerated feeling, “Welcome to XSeoul.”

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

XSeoul is the government’s attempt at distracting victims with a chance of fighting death off from the Apocalypse. 

That’s what they call it—the _Apocalypse_ , and Jaehwan thinks it might be in bad taste considering the implications the word has. South Korea’s been in a category-four nation-wide catastrophe for as long as Jaehwan can remember. War threats tied in with a corrupt government could never amount to much promise and he can’t even recall the last time he saw the sun in the morning. 

More days in childhood were spent avoiding exposure to outside elements (pollution and yellow dust to name a few) than not and he can fondly recall early adolescent years spent decorating face masks intended to protect them from unavoidable near-toxic pollution. 

Still, Seoul’s current state, as bad as it is, could probably be worse.

 _There’s Seoul,_ his mother used to say, _and then there’s the rest of Korea._

_There’s Seoul,_ his father used to say, _and then there’s the world._

It’s an injustice to the gravity of the end of the world to compare it to a city carrying the brunt of a country’s burdens.

When he hears the word _apocalypse_ , he doesn’t think of Seoul; he thinks of worse things, like zombies, underground bunkers meant to withstand the wrath of massive sea creatures, and the world on fire. Seoul’s downfall probably hasn’t dramatized itself enough to be worthy of a blockbuster—but maybe that’ll come years down the line, much later, far after he’s a pile of bones in the dirt. 

“Two old movies and the rapture as told by the Bible,” Ong Seongwoo, formerly known as _???_ chimes in. “You’re a dramatic one, aren’t you?”

Jaehwan glances up, barely avoiding slamming his shoulder into an unsuspecting passerby. The streets are chock-full, abuzz with human traffic. No one’s wearing a face mask to block out the fumes or the pollution. He can even make out the glow of streetlights bouncing off of Seongwoo’s skin. 

He thinks to ask whether being in a technologically engineered city makes his thoughts prone to exposure or if his brain-to-mouth filter has worsened since his consciousness departed his physical body, but Jaehwan wisely chooses to laugh instead. 

It’s been a little less than an hour since he first landed in XSeoul and the same thought occupies Jaehwan’s mind with each step he takes further into the city: _Surreal_.

“Sorry for almost stepping on you back there, by the way,” Seongwoo continues, waving a hand flippantly. “Was waiting for someone but almost got a shoe-ful of you instead!”

Contrary to the remorse his words are supposed to be expressing, Seongwoo sounds delighted. Jaehwan grins stiffly. 

“So, this is what heaven’s going to be like,” says Jaehwan. “Bright lights and a flashy tour guide.” 

“This is better than heaven,” Seongwoo replies. “It’s Utopia.” 

A giant billboard sign flickers then. Two rows of faces—one of them Jaehwan’s—glow on the screen. _WELCOME TO PARADISE,_ the sign reads. 

“One, two, three, _cue,_ ” Seongwoo counts.

The sign flashes _WELCOME TO XSEOUL._

Seongwoo whistles, finger dragging horizontally in the air. “Only nine this week.” 

He recognizes one of the nine: Ha Sungwoon. Admitted to the hospital on the same day as Jaehwan with a more severe case of _cloud cough_ , as the tabloids have been calling it. They hadn’t talked much—Jaehwan only remembers asking for Sungwoon’s pudding and getting staunchly rejected. 

“Asshole,” he mutters to himself. “Wait– _only_ nine?” Jaehwan nearly forgets to ask. 

“Last week was eleven,” Seongwoo explains. “The week before that was sixteen. A month ago, we’d get over fifty a week consistently. At our peak, over a _hundred_. Government even had to delete some of the Ghosts—they’re fake people, basically—so there’d be room on the streets to walk. It’s a good thing if the numbers are decreasing, though. Means there are less people dying. Means the city’s building itself back up. Less people want to leave it.” 

Jaehwan blinks. He supposes that makes sense. With the program slated to end, more people are busy trying to find footing in the real city they’ve opted to pool their bets in; it leaves little time for frolicking in a place like this.

“Then what are you?” he presses. “A Ghost?” 

Seongwoo snorts and feigns offense. “Me? Fake? Come on. Ghosts have never left this city.” He weaves between two people walking side-by-side and grins. “People like me, we call them Prisoners. We died in this city. Ditched our bodies in Seoul and decided to continue where we left off here.” It’s loud where they are but Jaehwan can still make out the scoff Seongwoo lets out as he grumbles, “Me, a Ghost. In what fucking world?” 

Jaehwan laughs sheepishly, nervously. “You can die here? I thought it was supposed to be a safe place. Kind of already have my hands full trying to stay alive in real Seoul. Was hoping to catch a break here, you know?” 

“You can do whatever you want here, rookie.” The expression on Seongwoo’s face shifts briefly into something vaguely somber. It only lasts a second before he’s smiling again—robotic. “Some idiots decide to die here because they think they’d like to stay longer than the twenty-four hours a week we’re mandated.”

He gets the feeling that this probably isn’t a conversation he should be pushing to have; especially not with a near-stranger he barely knows the real intentions of. For all Jaehwan knows, this could be an extended dream (or nightmare) and the climax hasn’t even hit him just yet. 

“There are more people like me,” Seongwoo says without prompting. “Call us what you want. Idiots, adrenaline junkies—”

“Prisoners.” 

Seongwoo sighs, long and purposeful. “Anyway,” he starts, “since you didn’t ask, I’m dragging you to a bar right now. You’re lucky to have run into me first. I’m giving you the real V.I.P. treatment and fast-tracking you straight into the most popular hang-out in XSeoul.”

“Huh,” Jaehwan exhales. He has questions that he’d like answered more than he’d like to visit the most popular hang-out in a city that’s, at best, a figment of his imagination.

“There’s someone like me there,” Seongwoo continues, as though he’s read Jaehwan’s thoughts—again. “He’s a nice kid, got a good head on his shoulders. He’ll probably be more patient with how slowly you walk, which, by the way, _pick up the pace_.” 

The crowd thickens then, almost instantaneously, and Jaehwan jolts before trying, maybe in vain, to zip through hordes of people as gracefully as Seongwoo does.

“He might be performing!” Seongwoo calls out from a few feet ahead. “You’ll like him.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

The tinTAP reminds Jaehwan of the bars in old movies. Everything seems to be made out of the same, dark, glossy wood and the bottles protruding from the slots behind the bartender’s counter are vast in quantity and variety. 

“This one’s on the house,” the bartender, Kenta, says with a smile. “A little welcome gift from the best bar around.”

“Don’t be swayed,” Sanggyun says from beside Jaehwan. He rolls his eyes and Jaehwan laughs in spite of only having met him ten minutes ago. “He’s like this with _everyone_.”

Kenta parts his lips to protest but is squarely interrupted by the sound of applause nearer to the stage.

Seongwoo pops back to the counter after his initial disappearance into the bar two seconds after shoving Jaehwan into Kenta and Sanggyun’s hands. He looks vaguely puzzled, gaze flickering from side-to-side. “You haven’t seen Minhyun or Jonghyun around?” he asks, louder, as the audience grows restless. “Thought they’d be in but I guess they might be saving up their hours.”

“They like to spend twenty-four hours straight canoodling,” Sanggyun confirms. “It’s disgustingly cute.”

“Are they,” Jaehwan begins, trailing off with hitched laughter. The question dies on the tip of his tongue because he isn't really sure how to ask. It hasn't been long enough for him to grasp the delicate undertones of certain words, concepts, ideas. He isn't sure if asking, _"Are they prisoners just like you?"_ is the best way to go about it.

“Nah,” Seongwoo replies easily, like he understands what Jaehwan's trying—and failing—to get at. “They’re just like you. The only one that’s just like _me_ is—oh, perfect timing.” 

"Right on time," Kenta croons, leaning over the edge of the bar counter with a glowing smile on his lips. Jaehwan isn't dense enough to miss the way Sanggyun's eyes follow it like a moth to the light. 

"He's popular around here," murmurs Seongwoo, dragging Jaehwan's attention away from matters that don't quite invite his company. "Nice kid, though. Eerily humble and he's been around in XSeoul even longer than I have." 

“‘Eerily humble’ is a weird way of complimenting someone,” Jaehwan whispers back.

“You’ll learn sooner or later.” Seongwoo crosses his arms against his chest and smiles sweetly—and in the ten minutes (give or take a few seconds) that they’ve known each other, Jaehwan’s already learned to read it as foreboding. “It’s hard not to think you’re hot shit in a city where anything’s possible.” 

There’s a joke on the tip of his tongue about how it seems like Seongwoo’s speaking from experience but Jaehwan parts his lips just as the crowd falls silent. He catches himself in time and clamps his mouth shut, gaze flickering from the side of Seongwoo’s face toward the front of the bar. 

The performer of the evening taps idly at the microphone. Inoffensive feedback reverberates off of the walls and Jaehwan squints, hoists himself up on the tips of his toes to try to get a better look (and to no avail).

All he can make out is the sound of a wooden stool scraping against the floor of the stage and a tiny, barely-audible chuckle that fills the room as though it were a shout. 

“Ah, ah,” that someone murmurs into the microphone. His voice is kind of strange, kind of _sticky_ , grating but in a maybe equally strangely good way. “Oh, good. It’s on. Um. Thank you for coming. As usual, I'll get right to it." 

Jaehwan hears a voice before he even thinks to ask for a name. 

The song that the guy is performing is familiar. It might be the same one he was listening to before landing on a beach on the edge of a manufactured city. He can almost remember the lyrics—only because they were kind of happy, kind of sad, kind of funny, kind of stupid. All at once. 

He gets sucked into the song, into the _performance_ , and barely notices the way Seongwoo laughs, dryly, from beside him.

“Hate this song,” he says to himself. It sounds like an admission, not an invitation, so Jaehwan doesn’t let himself ask. 

If he closes his eyes, Jaehwan thinks he might be able to imagine himself in Seoul—but not Seoul, a _different_ Seoul made up of only the best vignettes—vividly, more vividly than he can let himself exist in XSeoul. Narrow dust-covered roads, the cramped apartment he’s been living in with his family and extended relatives—the crazy neighbors too: Old Man Kim with his stupid obtrusive money tree and the Jung family and their worn-out kindness—for as long as he can remember, a beat-up death trap of a playground where he used to push the only kid that would play with him on the swing. _“Do you have to go home?”_ he’d ask, every one-hundredth push. _“I don’t have a home,”_ the kid would reply. 

The song stops abruptly. A sharp breath and then a pensive hum. “I forgot the lyrics,” comes the point-blank confession. He laughs. “It’s an old song and I’m not really sure why I know it, honestly. Ah, this is troublesome…” 

Jaehwan straightens his back and pretends he’s been present. 

"You good?" Seongwoo asks, grin wide on his lips. He leans in closer, jabs Jaehwan's side with his elbow. "Entranced?" 

"What?" Jaehwan stammers. He follows up what he thinks might have been a pretty shitty attempt at casual deflection with another nervous laugh. "No idea what you're talking about," he says. "Anyway, who is he?" 

It's strange how, standing in the middle of a crowded bar in the heart of an artificial city, Jaehwan almost feels like he's home. 

Home, but not _Seoul_ -home. It's especially strange, he supposes, because Seoul is the only thing loosely defined as home that he's ever known. There's nothing apocalyptic or near-disaster about the weight that seems to be falling from his back in tendrils. 

_XSeoul_ isn't what he means when he tries to put to words the exact feeling filling his entire body from head to toe. 

What he means is this exact moment. This exact place he's standing in. Everything about this scene: the same half-consumed cocktail in his hands, the people surrounding him, the lone flickering lightbulb just inches away and above him—down to the way Seongwoo's breathing seems perfectly aligned with Kenta's swaying and the steady rhythm Sanggyun is tapping out with his fingertips against the countertop. 

Jaehwan closes his eyes. Breathes in. He opens his eyes and feels a foreign tightness in his chest. 

He’s not the best at math but he knows how basic addition works. Deep-seated too-cherished memories plus fertile soil equals this exact feeling. 

He breathes out.

"That," Seongwoo begins in a whisper, lifting his index finger to drag it up and down before settling on a point: center stage, "is Jung Sewoon." 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

At the start of every week, the Developers will sit each participant down and have them divide their twenty-four hours over seven days. "You could spend thirty seconds on the other side if you wanted to," they had told him yesterday morning. "You could spend none one week and they'd roll over to the next. But it’s hard. After you get a taste, it’s hard to stay away for too long." 

First-timers usually follow a suggested schedule: six hours, four days; or four hours, six days. 

He isn't sure what consumed him then but all he feels right now is stupid, stupid gratitude for scrawling down on yellowed paper beneath _MONDAY_ : 23 hours. 

"Ah, so you're new," Sewoon says with a nod of his head. "How are you enjoying the city?" 

The bar's simmered down considerably since its peak occupancy four hours ago at the start of Sewoon's set. It must be the hour but people are trickling out one-by-one and eventually, almost every face in Jaehwan's vicinity is a face that he can recognize. 

"Found him washed-up on the beach like a seashell," Seongwoo answers on Jaehwan's behalf. He takes another hearty swig from a seemingly bottomless glass and Jaehwan makes a note to never leave his glass empty under Kenta’s enthusiastic supervision. "Most people don't fall from the sky or get spit up by the ocean when they're visiting XSeoul." 

“Most people aren’t unfortunate enough to meet Seongwoo first thing,” Sanggyun chimes in. 

Seongwoo looks affronted. “I’m great company,” he says, puffing out his chest. “I’ll have you know I almost stepped on him _but I didn’t._ ” 

“Wooow,” Sanggyun drawls out. “Luck must be on Jaehwan’s side. Most people would be walking around with a footprint on their face right about now.” 

"He must not be most people," Sewoon replies with a wry smile. He turns again, focuses his attention on Jaehwan in an uncomfortably insistent way. "You seem overwhelmed.”

Overwhelmed is a bit of an understatement considering he hasn’t really been explained much. Maybe it’s his fault for cracking jokes when the nurses and the doctors were trying to explain side-effects and dangerous risks. His fault for asking about robots and _World War Z_ and _Cloud Atlas_ and other stupid old movies when the Developers opened the conversation to questions.

"Kind of." Jaehwan runs his fingertip along the rim of his glass and covers it with his hand when he catches Kenta moving for the bottle. "I think I used the informational pamphlet they gave us about XSeoul as a coaster for my ramen." 

"You should ask us if you have any questions." Not too far off, Kenta chatters animatedly to Sanggyun, who, despite how lazily he's sitting—cheek squished against an open palm, elbow propped up on the counter with ease—doesn't tear his gaze away from Kenta for a second. "Seongwoo hyung and I have both been here for a while. He probably knows more than me now, to be honest. I don't really stray from my bubble very often." 

"You have a bubble in this big, bright city that we're supposed to be trying to conquer? What are you? Lazy, uninspired, or intimidated?” 

Sewoon laughs, and he doesn’t sound the least bit offended by what Jaehwan thinks might have been uninvited, too-quick, familiarity. He’s been told he’s like that, always stomping over boundaries like an overexcited two-year-old that’s met a stranger for the first time. 

“Sorry,” Jaehwan says quickly. He scratches his cheek and laughs: nervous tic. 

“Maybe a nice combination of all three,” replies Sewoon. The look in his eyes is far-off, almost disconnected. “What about you?” 

“What about me?” 

“Oh, you know—” Sewoon tilts his head to the side. “Are you going to conquer the city?” 

“Look at him, Sewoon,” Seongwoo interjects, bumping Jaehwan’s shoulder with his. “Everything on his face screams ‘I’m definitely dreaming.’ You can’t conquer a city you don’t believe in. What do you say, Jaehwan? Want me to pinch you ’til you wake up?” 

“I _am_ looking,” says Sewoon. And he really is. Sewoon’s been looking at Jaehwan, _studying_ Jaehwan since Seongwoo first dragged him up to the stage after the set ended to say _“Hey, I found you a new fan!”_ Wordlessly, too. 

Jaehwan half-expects a joke, something teasing to spill from Seongwoo’s mouth like air. Instead, he gets a hint of a smile, a glint in Seongwoo’s eyes that Jaehwan can’t read between the lines of. 

“Yeah?” Seongwoo hums. “What’s the verdict?” 

Sanggyun and Kenta stop talking, attentions piqued. 

“Verdict?” echoes Jaehwan.

“He’s good at reading people,” Sanggyun tells him. He blows bubbles into his bright-pink drink through his straw and doesn’t even flinch when Kenta makes a disgusted noise. “Sewoon, I mean. Seongwoo can’t read people for shit.” 

“It’s true,” Seongwoo concedes with a dramatically resigned shrug. “I’m a horrible judge of character because I am of horrible character.” 

“Hear, hear,” Sanggyun cheers.

“I’m not good at reading people.” Sewoon shakes his head, tearing his gaze away from Jaehwan and focusing instead on the unmarred edge of the counter. He lifts his chin, cranes his neck back until he’s staring at a distant spot on the ceiling, a light fixture, maybe. “How many hours do you have left today?” 

It feels like an eternity’s gone by but after glancing at the clock, Jaehwan’s almost, but not quite, startled to see it’s only been a few hours. “Nineteen.”

Sanggyun whistles. “Damn,” he says with a wide grin. He reminds Jaehwan of a shark. “I’m jealous. I have to head back in one.” 

“Got places to be?” Jaehwan asks. 

The grin on Sanggyun’s face doesn’t fade a bit. “Tsk tsk, forbidden question. Don’t you know the rules?” 

He doesn’t, and he’s feeling regret for the nth time that night for spilling ramen soup on his pamphlet. 

“Rule number one,” Sanggyun begins. “Don’t overstay your welcome.” 

“Two,” Kenta chimes in, “is to live your life, and let others live theirs.”

“Mind your business.” Sanggyun gnaws on his straw. “Two is to mind your own damn business.” 

“And three,” Seongwoo says, “which is maybe the most important of all is—”

“Keep them separate.” Sewoon folds his hands together, rests them atop his lap. 

Seongwoo empties his glass and this time, Kenta doesn’t rush to re-fill it. “If X marks the spot, then XSeoul is the treasure and Seoul is the plague.” He flicks the edge of the cup, waits for the hollow _clink_ to ebb into nothing before continuing. “And if you think about it, you wouldn’t want anyone to get tangled up in either, right?” 

“What that means is that your life here and your life up there—” 

Jaehwan scans the room, takes in the varying expressions before him. Some, he can read, and others, he doesn’t think he knows enough to decipher them. But Sewoon’s is telling; an alarmingly clear wistfulness that Jaehwan swears he’s seen before. 

There’s an unspoken apology in the way Sewoon smiles as he says, “Keep them separate.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Back at the bar, some people had disappeared out of thin air. 

Like magic. Or, maybe he might have thought that if he’d stopped thinking of disappearing acts and parallel universes as anything but technologically engineered. _Like magic,_ he’d thought jokingly, and the smarter, more rational part of him had insisted, despite his jest, _No, time’s just up._

“See ya’ around,” Sanggyun had said just moments before his wristwatch started beeping. “I’ll see you around, right? We haven’t scared you off from the city, have we?”

Jaehwan hadn’t had the time to respond. In the end, he’d said _“Not yet”_ to an empty space and tendrils of smoke curled around what once was a living, breathing human being. 

He’d be lying if he said he was used to it. It’s disorienting coming from a broken city, crumbling but trying wholeheartedly—and maybe foolishly—to keep itself together, to salvage what’s left of it. 

It’s disorienting coming from pieces of something to a whole that he’s never once experienced in his lifetime. 

“You realize how strange it is when you become the one that stays,” Sewoon says idly. 

“What’s with that?” Jaehwan asks aloud, words punctuated with a short, abrupt laugh. “Can everyone here read minds or something? My mind, specifically?” 

As though in response, Seongwoo, sprawled out a distance on the sand, forearm covering his eyes as he takes an impromptu nap, shifts and nearly kicks Jaehwan’s thigh. 

Sewoon’s lips part, and for a second, he remains like that: a smile suspended in the sheer sound of blistering and overwhelming existence. Jaehwan thinks to say something, to ask a question he doesn’t quite know the words to, but he doesn’t. He steeps in the quiet, too, and it—maybe he could call it _peace_ —comes naturally. 

“It’s unnerving now, isn’t it? Watching people disappear into thin air. Knowing that you’ll be disappearing into thin air too.” Jaehwan grimaces instinctively and Sewoon scrunches his shoulders sympathetically. “It still sends chills down my spine. I can remember how it feels.” 

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” replies Sewoon. “You don’t really _feel_ anything. That’s the scary part.” 

“Is that allowed?” Jaehwan leans back, digs the heel of his palms into the sand. “Are you allowed to tell me the cons before you tell me the pros? Won’t the police come and take you away for being a conspirator or something?” 

“Wow,” Sewoon exhales. “What kind of rumors are floating around up in Seoul?”

“Typical stuff you’d expect. The floor is made of silver-lined clouds, a full orchestra provides original musical accompaniment for your every move, the most beautiful person on the planet feeds you grapes from the vine with startling sincerity.” 

Sewoon kicks at the sand. “You must be disappointed, then. I could find you grapes if you wanted some.” 

“What were you expecting when you first came here?”

“Blue skies and no line for a hot meal.” 

“Things are better now,” explains Jaehwan. “Not by much, but hey, any progress is progress, right? Come up to the surface and see for yourself sometime. We have the luxury to be dreamers these days.” 

“That’d be nice,” Sewoon murmurs. “I would if I could.” 

“You can’t take it back? I mean, I don’t know much about—uh, well, being a, you know—”

“A Prisoner? It’s okay to say it. It might sound offensive, but it really isn’t. At least, not to us. I used to call myself a tree. Rooted to wherever I’m meant to stay. But then Seongwoo hyung told me _‘who’s to say a tree doesn’t choose when and where to fall?’_ and ever since then I’ve embraced it.” Sewoon encircles his wrist with his thumb and index finger. “My shackles.” 

“I’d rather be called a Prisoner than a Ghost,” Jaehwan offers, maybe in consolation. 

“You should try to stay content with being a Visitor.” He’s drawing circles in the sand again. A circle, then a triangle in the circle, and then four more circles— “Do you have anything you’re curious about? You’ll probably find more answers here than you will in Seoul.” 

“Why’d you choose to stay?” 

Sewoon shifts, gaze flickering from the palm of his open hand to Jaehwan, vague shock ebbing from his features. “I meant about the city. You know, about your options. Things that concern you directly.” His lips curve into another smile and it’s strangely intriguing how many secrets Sewoon seems to have. Jaehwan thinks for a second that Sewoon isn’t going to humor him until he says, “I didn’t have anyone waiting for me.” 

XSeoul has an unfamiliar balance to it—or maybe it’s a lack, thereof. Jaehwan feels like he’s sliding forward, down; like the world is tilted on an axis that’s meant to keep them climbing for something unforeseeably distant and unforeseeably bright. 

He’d felt it back in his first hour, in the crowded streets of the city. Had felt un-belonging that he’d been okay with, and the feeling that he was taking tiny steps forward in a race everyone cared about that didn’t matter in the end.

It’s confusing. The city, the _world_ that he’s been given on a silver platter. He almost wants to ask how on Earth there could be people who choose to stay in this artificial equilibrium. He wants to know what it is about unsettling perfection that makes people want to keep it. 

Jaehwan stills—his body, his thoughts—and instead asks, “Waiting for you where?” 

“In Seoul,” Sewoon says easily. “My family left me when I was young. It might have been by accident or it might have been on purpose, but I was alone for a while. When I got stopped at the hospital and they asked me if I wanted to be a beta tester for XSeoul, I thought it was my luck finally turning around.

“And, you know, for a while, it really felt like it was. I was in a city where the air was clean, the water was blue, the skies bluer. I could be and do whatever I wanted and I didn’t have to worry about things like jealousy and greed and sadness. So, I stayed.”

“How did you—” He pauses, rubs at his neck uncertainly, thinks back to Seongwoo saying he _died here_. “How did you ‘stay’?” 

“I guess...” Sewoon trails off. “How it happens is, you choose to stay. You make a choice, and then the Developers will talk you through it. They’ll ask you a lot of questions, record you saying a lot of things. They’ll run tests, make sure you’re okay physically, mentally, emotionally. And then at the very last second, they’ll sit you down and run you through everything again and again and again and finally, they’ll tell you, _’you could be lost forever,’_ and you get to think about it before telling them, ‘that’s okay.’”

“And you said it was okay? Just like that?” 

“I said it was _fine_ , actually.” He laughs. “Sounds harder than it actually is. People like me, people like Seongwoo hyung, we’re all running away from things we can only hide from here. Or, at least, that’s what we think. There’s a part of me that wants to wake up in Seoul again. My body’s still there, still breathing, and every now and then, I’ll have dreams where my parents wake up one morning and decide that they’d like to find me again. And they do. They stand by my hospital bed and shake my arm and just like that, I wake up.” 

“Can you… you know… Can you wake up?” 

“I think so,” Sewoon says with a slow bob of his head. “There’s a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes the link between our consciousness and our physical bodies is too strong. That’s how Floaters wake up, or get out of limbo. Their consciousness starts tugging and tugging at them until they open their eyes and, _aha_ , they’re in Seoul again.” 

“Floaters?”

“Floaters.” Sewoon blows a piece of lint off of his sleeve. “Some people get lost when they’re being downloaded permanently into XSeoul. Usually because they’re scared, nervous—uncertain.” 

He hadn't really been expecting the conversation to take this turn and Jaehwan's grateful for Sewoon's willingness to answer the questions but cautious, suddenly, of the things he's supposed to be asking. “This is against the rules,” Jaehwan announces. “I should be minding my own business.”

“Do you actually care about the rules?” inquires Sewoon. “You don’t seem too attached to the idea of a perfect world.”

“I’m not,” Jaehwan admits with a shrug. “I’m just keeping you in consideration. Wouldn’t want you to get kicked out of your home, you know?” 

Sewoon has a slowness to him. A deliberate lag, an omnipresent lethargy. He speaks and moves as though everything he does through his body comes after deep, thoughtful consideration. In XSeoul, people move in hordes, in a rush, as though their hearts are always one step ahead of their bodies. It makes sense, he supposes; in a city with as much opportunity as this one, it’d be hard not to try to make the most of it. In Seoul, people move like mice. They scamper through smog-heavy streets and look both ways once, twice, thrice before crossing empty roads. 

What Jaehwan’s come to know are two extremes: boldness and fearfulness. 

What he sees in Sewoon is a medium that he thinks he might be fixating on: resignation.

“They don’t really care about the rules,” Sewoon says. “They’re not enforced. They’re more for us than they are for anyone else. It’s to keep us from getting confused, getting lost in between two different worlds. I’ve already made my decision. I don’t mind telling you my story.” 

Seongwoo shifts again, turns on his side and groans groggily when he gets sand in his mouth. 

“We’re all running away from things,” he says again, and his eyes linger on the back of Seongwoo’s head. “We’re all chasing things.” 

“Do you think someday you’ll wake up in Seoul and be totally okay with it?” 

He gets a laugh out of Sewoon. 

“Yeah, maybe,” Sewoon says. “That’d be absurd but funny. It happens. The Developers tell you before you ask to stay in XSeoul. They’ll tell you about all of the instances in which people woke up back in their real bodies for inexplicable reasons. _‘That could be you,’_ is what they told me. _‘Your mind could reject Utopia.’_ One of the Developers I spoke to was a living, breathing example. He said the first thing he said when he woke up in Seoul was, _‘Thank God.’_ ”

“You know, I think out of everything I’ve experienced in XSeoul so far,” Jaehwan opens, “the strangest thing I’ve seen is you.” 

Sewoon blinks. Slowly, deliberately, in a manner that Jaehwan has already begun to attribute to him, and him alone. He has thirteen hours left, and in the past ten, he’s learned more than fathomable about people that don’t know a single thing about him, really—and vice versa. 

“Me,” repeats Sewoon. “Me?” 

“You,” Jaehwan confirms.

“Seongwoo hyung is a little strange,” suggests Sewoon, gesturing demurely to Seongwoo, still sprawled out on the sand and out cold. “Are you sure it’s me?” 

“The entire world could be turning itself inside out and I wouldn’t be surprised if I stumbled to a beat-up, empty, ransacked bar and found you at a broken microphone strumming the same, sad song as though nothing had changed.” 

“Huh.” 

“Huh,” Jaehwan echoes. 

“Is that a good thing?” 

“Yeah, I think so,” he says, and the cadence of his voice is speckled with tiny streams of laughter—as it often is. Mirth, Jaehwan figures, comes even easier now when he doesn’t have to be wary of his surroundings. “I mean, I don’t know. I think it would be comforting knowing that the world could stop spinning and you would still be the same.” 

“You don’t know me that well, do you?” Sewoon asks, amusement evident even when he isn’t smiling. 

“I don’t,” Jaehwan admits. “But of the ten hours that I’ve spent here so far, nine of them have been with you. So, if it means anything, I know more about you than I know about myself in the grand scheme of things.” 

“Huh,” Sewoon says again.

“ _Huh_.” 

“Nine hours is a lot. Ten is even more. You still have thirteen more to kill.” 

Jaehwan shifts, flops backwards onto his back and clamps his eyes shut, folding his hands atop his stomach. “I’m going to sleep until I have to go home.” 

“Most people spend their first night in XSeoul climbing to the top of N Tower and skydiving from it.” 

“Some stranger I met tonight told me I’m not like most people.” 

Sewoon doesn’t say anything immediately. He only laughs. 

“I think it’s easier to be carefree in XSeoul,” Sewoon says. “The people here—they don’t have much to hide. Not in a city that is generous to them regardless of how they lived their lives in Seoul. Don’t you think a city like this is a great place to start fresh?” 

“Wow,” Jaehwan murmurs, eyes fluttering open. “This kind of sounds like a proposal.” 

“It’s—” Sewoon’s gaze falls to Jaehwan incredulously, his lips pursed and quirked with restrained laughter. “It _is_ easier to fall in love when no one’s hiding anything.” 

“I like roses and surprise events,” says Jaehwan. He adds on an obnoxious wink that wins another laugh from Sewoon. 

“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

“You never told me, by the way.” He picks up a fistful of sand, watches, bored, as the grains slip past the gaps between his fingers. A few stray pieces flit toward his face and Jaehwan squints. “The verdict, I mean,” he amends. “The verdict about me. Because you’re good at reading people. Or something?”

“I’m not good at reading people,” Sewoon says for the second time. He draws a circle in the sand and then drags his index finger through it. “I just like people. And, well, I guess the verdict is that you’re no exception.” 

Jaehwan bites back a smile.

“Oh,” Sewoon continues, falling to his back until he’s lying side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder next to Jaehwan. He folds his hands atop his chest and focuses his gaze on the stars. “Before I forget: I don’t sing sad songs. I make it a habit not to.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Sewoon is right about disappearing. 

It doesn’t hurt. It only aches. 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

“The learning curve is totally different in XSeoul,” Jaehwan says, mostly to the ceiling. 

“Oh?” 

“I met some people there,” he continues, as vaguely as possible so as not to break any rules. “Right off the bat, I ran into a guy that treated me like a family friend. Then everyone I met after that talked to me like they knew me. Like they _understood_ me. And, I mean, what am I supposed to do with that _besides_ treat them the same way? So, I did. I treated them like they were my friends.” 

“Are you complaining? It sounds like a good thing.” 

Jaehwan closes his eyes. “It’s both.” He squeezes them shut, tighter. Frowns. Frowns even _more_ , if it’s possible, when he struggles to make out Sewoon’s features in his mind to the most minute detail. “We’re not supposed to wonder how to bridge the gap between here and there, are we?”

He doesn’t get a response for a passing second, and then: “No, you’re not.” 

“Then I must be selfish.” He laughs—high-pitched, nervous, as always. “God, I’m selfish.”

Something clatters, the sound of metal hitting metal. The machine he’s hooked up to beeps robotically. 

“What makes you say that?”

He inhales and then exhales slowly, opens his eyes and tries to count the spots that swarm in from his periphery as he tries to adjust to the starch white ceiling above him. 

“I don’t know,” Jaehwan confesses. “I think, maybe, because I woke up after my first twenty-three hours in XSeoul and the first thing I thought was, _‘I want to find him here.’_ ” 

The only response he gets is a hum. 

He closes his eyes again. “ _‘I want to find them here.’_ There are questions we aren’t supposed to ask, right? Well, I wanted answers to them. I still want answers. I keep thinking it’d be nice to find everyone here. To meet them as the versions of themselves that they're trying to hide from.” 

“You can’t do that,” comes softly. 

“I can’t,” Jaehwan agrees. 

There is silence again and Jaehwan fails to find comfort in it the way he did in Sewoon’s quiet. He breathes in once more, feels the breath leave his body in a shudder. 

Today, he’ll go home and sleep in a too-small, too-cramped apartment in the worst part of an already worse-Seoul. He’ll walk out of that same apartment tomorrow morning with a mask over his face, careful not to wear white because he’ll come home with his shirt stained gray. He’ll walk the same streets as he would any other day, say hello to the same people, and at night, he will dream the same dream: a beat-up playground and a little boy laughing on a swing. 

Next week, he’ll leave footprints in the sand, count white clouds against a bright blue sky, and fall stupidly in love with a boy he doesn’t know.

Jaehwan clenches his jaw. “That’s why I must be selfish.”

“That’s not true,” his nurse says as he gently plucks the IV from Jaehwan’s forearm. He laughs softly. “You’re only human.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Everyone in Seoul has a humble beginning. It’s the charm of a broken city—everyone deserves a happy ending, and Kim Jaehwan is no exception. 

Still, he’s better off than most. He’ll admit it any day.

The Apocalypse has taken a lot from the people: families, homes, far-off dreams. And sure, it’s taken things from him too. But he counts his blessings every morning and the fact that they reach far past ten fingertips is something to be grateful for. He has his family, he has a home; and where the Apocalypse has whittled down the will of the masses, it’s inspired his. 

He looks at Seoul now and thinks, _How lucky am I to see it rebuild itself?_

He looks at Seoul now—with all of its gray, its fading, its worn-out corners—and thinks, _How could I give this up for the world?_

“No wonder you’re bored here,” Seongwoo says. “You’re all about dynamic things, aren’t you? Always rooting for the underdog. Hate to break it to you, though, but there’s nothing more static than consistent, unblemished, manufactured perfection.” 

“It’s my home,” Jaehwan says. “I grew up there. I had to learn to love it to stay alive and I guess old habits die hard.” 

“It was my home too,” replies Seongwoo, softer. “Some things in life aren’t permanent. Most things aren’t.”

“Gee, you must be the life of the party. Crazy how the club didn’t implode into a preschool when you walked out of it.” 

“Cool it, rookie. It’s not a bad thing.” He takes a healthy swig from the bottle of beer he’s smuggled out of the club. “It’s what keeps us on our toes. Keeps us moving forward. Keeps us thankful.” 

“Sounds like you have some secrets.” 

Seongwoo offers a crooked smile and lifts his drink, clinks it against Jaehwan’s. “Loss is a great teacher. I’ll admit it through gritted teeth.” 

The music from the club is loud and Jaehwan can _feel_ it even from where they’re standing out in the cold directly across the street. Seongwoo had insisted that if Jaehwan had _one_ hour to kill, it’d be best spent in the most popular club in XSeoul. As it turned out, clubbing was less than Jaehwan’s strongest suit and they’d found themselves loitering against a dirtied brick wall with bottles of beer in their hands and nothing but the cold-bitten red in their cheeks to show for their night out. 

_“We lasted fifteen minutes,”_ Seongwoo had said through a laugh. _“You’re even worse than Daniel.”_

And he hadn’t asked then who _Daniel_ was but he thinks now that the name’s probably the answer to the reason why Seongwoo’s gaze always lingers on the horizon.

“Would you ever want to go back?” Jaehwan asks, maybe too suddenly. He doesn’t get a response—doesn’t even get a _reaction_ and he almost wants to laugh it off, brush it away, pretend he never asked. 

But Seongwoo’s been remarkably transparent, remarkably _honest_ since day one. The only secrets he might have are because Jaehwan can’t bring himself to ask. 

“Yeah,” Seongwoo says in a breath—a reply lost in an exhale. He presses the rim of the bottle to his bottom lip, gaze drifting to the top of the building across them and then to the sky. “Yeah,” he says again, quieter this time. “Stupid, right?” 

“Sure,” replies Jaehwan. “But being stupid is just being human.” 

“Alright, I didn’t ask for your philosophizing.” The expression Seongwoo’s wearing ebbs into something a little more forlorn. “Listen,” he starts, voice wavering, “I have a favor to ask you. You can pretend I never asked if you want to, I just—I just figured I should give it a try.” 

Jaehwan nods his head slowly, deliberately, as though he’s wary of spooking Seongwoo or something. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure.” 

“Christ,” Seongwoo mutters into the sky. “I make a big fucking deal about not breaking any rules and here I am about to smash the most important one into a thousand pieces.” 

“Hyung, no offense, but you never really seemed like a huge stickler for order.” 

“Ha-ha.” The laugh Seongwoo offers is dry but it seems to do the trick; his hands aren’t shaking anymore and the tenseness in his jaw seems to fade little by little. He takes another long swig from his bottle. “There’s someone I’m looking for,” he says. “I don’t really know if it’s worth my time to keep waiting, you see. We were supposed to be here together but, I…” 

“Things happen,” Jaehwan suggests.

“Things happen,” Seongwoo echoes. He exhales, a sigh mixed with a chuckle. “Yeah, shit happens. I woke up in XSeoul and he wasn’t next to me.” 

Jaehwan rubs his neck. “Sorry.”

“Sorry? Don’t make it weird.” Seongwoo grins. “Anyway, I just… I don’t know. It’s been a while, to be totally honest. I’m kind of tired of going through disaster scenarios in my head every night so I thought, uh, well, I thought it’d be nice to get some closure. You know, find out for sure whether he’s out and about in Seoul—and even better, if he’s doing okay. If he’s… living life?” 

It’s a heavy conversation to be having when Jaehwan has ten minutes left before his disappearing act commences. He sympathizes though. The gap between XSeoul and Seoul is immeasurably large, _scarily_ so considering the fact that they are two sides of the same coin. Bridging the gap is hard, and wading through vague uncertainties for however-long doesn’t sound pleasant in the slightest.

“You’re asking me to break probably every single rule they have in place here,” Jaehwan says aloud. “I’ve been told that the rules are there to keep us from getting lost.” 

Seongwoo leans back, lets his head fall gently against the brick wall behind them. “Maybe I’ve got to be lost to actually find what I’m looking for.” 

“Let’s say I find this person you’re missing,” Jaehwan continues. “What do you want me to tell them?” 

He wonders what the last word he’ll hear before he disappears will be. Maybe he’ll wake up in a hospital bed in Seoul, with only a half-constructed apology streaming from Seongwoo’s lips on his mind. Maybe it’ll be a choked-out _I love you_ , or a _Please come back to me_ that he’ll have to deliver to a faceless stranger in a sea of many.

“‘ _Don’t worry about me._ ’”

Jaehwan freezes before slowly pressing his palms to his knees in a futile attempt at steadying himself. It’s been less than two days in this city and he already feels caught in the intricate web of severed and re-knotted wires connecting it to the surface—to _reality_. 

“What’s his name?” Jaehwan finally ventures. 

In the last minute of his allotted twenty-four hours of _Utopia_ , he sees XSeoul’s poster-boy suspend himself in defeat. Seongwoo’s expression flickers from one of doubt, to guilt, to hurt, and to resigned peace in a matter of seconds.

He doesn’t look at Jaehwan when he says, slowly, carefully, and with too much meaning packed behind each and every single syllable, “Kang Daniel.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Selfishness has always run in his blood. 

_“Jaehwan,”_ his mother once told him, _“it was selfish of us to keep you by our sidem but we couldn’t bear to lose you.”_

As a child, his mother’s words made very little sense to him until his father sat him down one day and broke down why the family next door always looked so exhausted. 

Their story, he’d soon come to know, wasn’t unique. Hundreds of thousands of families each day gave up their children knowing that the government would take the Abandoned into the custody of the state. They’d get food and a place to sleep in and the only thing they’d have to carry would be loneliness. _“Better them than us,”_ their parents would tell themselves.

 _“They regret it,”_ his father explained, _“and who wouldn’t? But our time calls for these scary sacrifices sometimes. So be kind, Jaehwan, because there’s no telling what sacrifices someone’s had to make.”_

He’s not very fond of admitting defeat, too stubborn and headstrong to stop clinging to the things he wants, the things he loves. So, maybe he is selfish. And maybe Jaehwan’s okay with that. 

This is what he tells himself when he wakes up in gritty, old Seoul to a name badge that reads _‘Kang Daniel’_ dangling in front of him.

“Do you believe in fate?” he mumbles out hoarsely. 

Daniel freezes before straightening up, tucking his badge into his pocket and setting his clipboard on the bedside table. “Fate?” he repeats. 

“Nothing,” Jaehwan says with a bleary shake of his head. “Never mind. Hey, you know how the government’s phasing XSeoul out so they can focus funding on other things? Do you think you’d ever want to visit?” 

The laugh Daniel offers in response is nervous and it dies in seconds. “I… no,” he says. “No, I can’t.” 

“You can’t?” 

“I can’t,” repeats Daniel. His knuckles are white, whiter with each passing second. “It’s not possible.” 

He can already tell he’s treading territory he doesn’t belong in. Jaehwan rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands and sits up, jolting once when the IV attached to him tugs back. “Sorry,” he says as lightheartedly as he can manage and to Daniel’s visible relief. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” 

Jaehwan says the same thing, makes the same apology when he finds himself in the tinTAP a week and a half after his conversation with Seongwoo. 

“You could start from the beginning,” Sewoon suggests gently. “After taking a deep breath, maybe.” 

The past week and a half has consisted of many futile attempts at self-reflection. He’s already managed to spend twenty-four whole hours on his own, wandering the city and trying to fall in love with it. The result has been minimal success and consistent headaches every single time he wakes up, looks Daniel in the eye, and thinks, _‘How do I fix what might need to stay broken?’_

Talking to Daniel shouldn’t be as hard as he’s making it out to be. There doesn’t need to be a long-winded conversation; all Jaehwan has to say is Seongwoo is alive and happy and wishes him well. When he breaks everything down to its bare foundation, however, all Jaehwan can think about is the pained look on Daniel’s face when he said he could never go to XSeoul—could never go _back_. 

He almost wishes Seongwoo were here instead of _taking a nap_ , as Kenta had put it. Maybe just so Jaehwan could lie through gritted teeth and tell him that finding a specific person in the midst of hundreds, thousands, is impossible. 

Jaehwan inhales and exhales purposefully. “Just,” he starts, only to stop. His head hurts and he kind of wants to be napping too. “Just—I… What’s a good, normal way of saying ‘I feel like I’m stuck between two planes of existence, help!’”

Sewoon pauses, seems frozen in time for a second before he smiles. “That sounds good and normal to me.” 

Truth be told, he isn’t sure how long he’s been here or how long he has left. All he knows is that Kenta has been sympathetically generous with the drinks and Sewoon has been beside him consistently and hasn’t asked a single question about where Jaehwan’s been for the past thirty-seven hours. 

“I’m running out of time to figure things out,” he bemoans. “How do I figure things out?” 

What he’s expecting is, maybe, a consolatory pat on the shoulder or something—an entirely unassuming, nonintrusive gesture of support that would be very characteristically Sewoon. What he _gets_ , however, is a tap on the back of his hand. 

“What?” 

Sewoon slides off of his bar stool and gestures toward the door. “Can I show you something?”

“I’m really not interested unless you’re going to take me out of my misery,” Jaehwan jokes as he follows suit.

“You’re so dramatic,” Sewoon says with a small laugh. “I think you need a break from whatever this is.”

“Don’t hate on my flair for life.”

Sewoon shakes his head, tries to bite back the smile that’s been growing on his lips. “I never said I hated it.” 

The sun has already dimmed, creeping toward the horizon. People fill the streets as usual, some faces eerily familiar and others no more than passing blurs in Jaehwan’s periphery. 

The tightness in his heart loosens instantaneously when he feels Sewoon interlock his pinky with Jaehwan’s. 

Jaehwan looks up and meets Sewoon’s gaze, wonders to himself if it shows on his face how quickly his heart is beating. 

“Let’s go,” Sewoon says, leading Jaehwan forward. “Don’t get lost.”

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Sewoon lives in a lighthouse. 

Which, all things considered, shouldn’t really surprise Jaehwan. He wants to make a joke—something about living, breathing metaphors; something about beacons; something about _guiding lights_ , but everything falls flat by the time they climb the spiral stairwell and manage to stumble (literally, stumble, because Sewoon doesn’t mention the step until after Jaehwan trips on it) into Sewoon’s tiny nook overlooking the ocean. 

It’s not just the expansive view of the ocean that plucks the words from the tip of Jaehwan’s tongue. It’s the sun setting atop it, orange glow staining rolling waves as the sky bleeds into something dimmer.

Sewoon drags his mattress to the window and seats himself, cross-legged, on it. Jaehwan follows suit. And for a little while, that’s all there is to it. They sit in silence and watch as day eases into night and no one says a thing because there’s nothing demanding to be said. 

“My mom used to tell me stories about the ocean,” Sewoon says. “She grew up in Busan and she said she’d always play at _Gwangalli_ , chasing the tide. I remember almost everything about my parents but their stories especially. My mom would tell me about the ocean and my dad would tell me about the mountains and it was weird. When you grow up under government care, you’re treated as a collective unit instead of an individual. The only thing I had that made me different were my parents’ stories.

“Of course I miss them. It’s been years. I still miss them, and I miss them even when I think they might not miss me. 

“You don’t know that,” Jaehwan murmurs. 

“I don’t,” Sewoon concedes. He pulls his knees to his chest, wraps his arms around them. “I used to sneak out of the dormitory I lived in. I was the smallest back then, so I was the only one that could get out of the hole in the fence. I didn’t do anything bad. I’d just go to a playground and play and play until the sun started setting and I had to go back. Back in Seoul, no one really has the energy to be envious when everyone is hurting the same, but I was so jealous of the families I saw on the streets. I think back to when I was younger and I really say to myself, ‘ _Ah, how ignorant._ ’” 

He feels a strange tremor at the very core of his chest. It’s weird; Jaehwan can relate. He knows a thing or two about hiding at the playground.

“You wanted what you didn’t have,” says Jaehwan. “That can’t be helped.” 

It’s close to dark outside now and the shadows lingering in Sewoon’s room grow larger and larger until they ebb into one. Sewoon reaches over and fumbles with a portable lamp, setting it down and reaching behind to grab at a blanket. He drapes it over Jaehwan’s shoulders and, unfazed, tugs the other half around his own. 

They’re sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and if Jaehwan closes his eyes and stills his breathing, he swears he might be able to catch the cadence of Sewoon’s heartbeat. 

“I’ve never told anyone all of this,” Sewoon says. “I don’t know why I feel so comfortable around you. I’m sorry if it’s burdensome.”

“It’s not,” Jaehwan says, maybe too quickly. “It’s—it’s not. I feel the same. I mean, it’s weird, isn’t it? First time, really, in a completely foreign city and I’m already letting my guard down around a complete stranger when I don’t even let my guard down around my grandma. But understandably so. My grandma is really apt at stealing my dumplings when she thinks I’m not looking.” 

He wins a laugh and it’s ridiculous how much it means to Jaehwan. 

“There’s this look in your eyes, hyung. Like you really, really want to see everyone happy.” Sewoon sighs softly. “Maybe if I’d met you in Seoul, I never would have gotten lost down here.” 

“Who knows? You might wake up in Seoul tomorrow and scare the crap out of me.” 

“I’ve always wondered,” confesses Sewoon. “Where I am in Seoul right now. I know I’m sleeping somewhere, but I wonder—I wonder where? Who’s taking care of me? Ah… I can’t help but think it’d be nice to say ‘thank you’ to them.” 

Jaehwan hums pensively, curling into the blanket further—and subsequently, closer to Sewoon. He feels tired, which isn’t something he’s experienced often in XSeoul. It might just be that time’s running out for the day, or maybe Sewoon really does have a supernatural knack for getting Jaehwan to let his guard down.

“Tired?”

“A little,” Jaehwan yawns out. “I might be going home soon. Or maybe the adrenaline rush of being in XSeoul has worn off.” 

“You can sleep here,” Sewoon offers. He shrugs the blanket off and wraps it tighter around Jaehwan, inching toward the edge of the mattress to give Jaehwan more room. 

He doesn’t argue with Sewoon, only flops down onto his back wordlessly, turning onto his side and letting his eyes close.

“Sing that song for me,” Jaehwan mumbles drowsily. 

“Which one?”

“The sad one that isn’t sad—the one you performed my first night here.” 

It’s warm here. He’s warm, inside and out. With his eyes closed and his mind quiet, Jaehwan can almost convince himself that this is the happy medium he’s been searching for, the special equilibrium between Seoul and its perfect parallel. 

“ _I’m happy right now, so I’m nervous, too. Just like there’s always the calm before the storm,_ ” Sewoon begins to sing.

Jaehwan hums along. He can picture himself in the hospital room, the same song filtering in and out of the beat-up radio Daniel carries around everywhere. 

“ _You know it’s hard to put out a burning fire._ ”

Sewoon’s voice grows quieter by the second.

“ _I’ll cheer for love._ ” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Where there should be an ache, there’s only warmth—lingering. 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Prisoners tend to sleep a lot. 

Jaehwan has learned a handful of interesting anecdotes since he first landed in XSeoul nearly a month ago. He’s also tactfully avoided asking questions he knows he doesn’t want to hear the answers to—but sometimes, the answers have a roundabout way of getting to him. 

Regardless of how little he wants them to find him. 

“It’s because they have to rest,” Kenta explains, reaching across the table to swipe a fry from Sanggyun’s tray. “I mean, we all have to rest—but Prisoners! They _really_ have to rest!” 

“What Kenta means,” Minhyun interjects calmly, “is that Prisoners are different from run-of-the-mill Visitors like you, or me—”

“Or me,” Sanggyun chimes in. “Or Jonghyun.” 

Jonghyun glances at them and smiles sympathetically, probably only half-aware of what they’re talking about. “What are we talking about?” he asks, confirming Jaehwan’s suspicions. 

The exasperation on Minhyun’s face forces Jaehwan to stifles his snicker. “We’re talking about Seongwoo and Sewoon not being here,” he replies with a shake of his head. “Jaehwan wanted to know where they were.” 

“Thanks, mom,” Jaehwan sing-songs. 

“Anyway,” Minhyun sighs out. “Prisoners are different from Visitors. They’re here for the long-term but weren’t programmed, specifically, to be here for the long-term like Ghosts. They chose to be. But unlike you or me—” Sanggyun parts his lips but Minhyun continues, louder, “ _or_ Sanggyun or Jonghyun, who are only here for a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things, they have a weak connection to their physical bodies because they’ve been down here for so long.” 

“Before you ask,” Jonghyun starts, “his friend is a Developer.”

“Yeah, he’s not actually this smart,” Sanggyun jokes. 

This might be a heavy conversation to have in a McDonald’s. He’s been down in XSeoul for nearly one-hundred hours now and it’s still hard to come to terms with the fact that this is, in one way or another, his reality. 

Sure, it jars him that they’re sitting in the middle of a well-lit, clean, fast-food restaurant that, in Seoul, would probably be the complete opposite in every which way, if not already closed and boarded up at the doors, having casual-not-so-casual conversation about seemingly meaningless things with zero worry about tomorrow. 

But he can’t say he’s unhappy. 

“The more Prisoners sleep down here, the less they’ll sleep in the future though,” Kenta says, pursing his lips. “That’s how it works, right? The more they sleep, the weaker their body is in Seoul. Once the body goes to sleep forever, you wake up forever in XSeoul.” 

“If you say it like that it sounds like a threat.” Sanggyun flattens his gaze, tries to look menacing. “ _Death isn’t forever._ ”

“I didn’t say it like that!” Kenta huffs. 

“Might as well have. Why don’t you tell Jaehwan that Santa isn’t real while you’re at it?” 

Kenta gasps, scandalized. He looks from left-to-right, as though trying to pinpoint any wandering children that may have heard Sanggyun’s shocking truth. “You’re a _monster_ ,” he whispers. 

“Alright, alright. Let’s not cause a scene in the neighborhood McDonald’s,” Jonghyun says with a wry smile.

“Again,” Minhyun adds.

“ _Again._ ” 

Jaehwan swallows his laugh. He’s known Kenta and Sanggyun since his very first hour in XSeoul. He’s known Minhyun and Jonghyun for significantly less, but he’s appreciative of how easy it really is to become acquainted with near-strangers in XSeoul. Sewoon was undoubtedly right when he said it was much simpler approaching people when there was nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. 

If he’s being honest, Jaehwan has always been a pretty candid person, unfiltered in most respects and constantly talking out of his ass. But it feels less out-of-place here than anywhere else. 

“So, is there, like, uh, I don’t know… a set number of hours people sleep?” Jaehwan scratches his cheek. “A quota?”

Sanggyun leans over conspiratorially, jabbing Jaehwan in the side with his elbow. “Don’t be so shy, Jaehwan. You can just tell us that you miss Sewoon,” he says, shit-eating grin practically glowing. “Kenta knows _everything_.”

“Not everything,” Kenta says with an equally wicked smile. “Just most things! Like the fact that you guys practically held hands last week before spending the night at Sewoon’s place.” 

“That’s not—that’s _not_ what happened?” Jaehwan sputters out. “What the hell? We didn’t hold hands? He held my wrist. It’s different. For starters, they—they look entirely different? They’re different _functionally_.” 

“You’re blushing.” Sanggyun lets out a whistle. “That’s embarrassing.” 

“Embarrassingly _cute_ ,” Kenta coos. 

Perhaps out of the kindness in his heart, Jonghyun lifts a hand as though to silence everyone. “Come on, guys,” he says, “we can tease Jaehwan about his crush later when Sewoon’s here and it’ll be twice as satisfying.” 

Jaehwan parts his lips to protest but says nothing. The kindness in Jonghyun’s heart is nowhere to be seen and Jaehwan doesn’t even have the words to mourn.

“Speaking of sleeping though… Seongwoo’s been sleeping a lot these days, hasn’t he?” Minhyun presses his lips into a line, eyes fixed on a stray napkin. He lifts his head and works a smile onto his face, though his shoulders are tense. “I guess he’s really going to be a permanent resident soon?” 

It’s impossible not to catch the way the mood shifts, everyone’s expressions growing more restrained. 

Seongwoo has been sleeping a lot. He hadn’t thought much of it because there wasn’t much for him to compare to, but it’s clear that the rest of their friends have clear cause for concern that Jaehwan doesn’t know anything about. He wants to ask what the big deal is about taking a couple of extra naps during the day but Jaehwan has a feeling that a question like that might be inviting a conversation he doesn’t really want to partake in.

“It’s what he wanted from the start,” Sanggyun replies. His expression has sobered into something more resigned, relieved, and strangely _hurt_. “I mean, good for him if it’s time, you know? Maybe he’ll finally get his mind off of, well, everything, and settle down. Take a breather. Stop holding onto things that hurt him—”

“Sanggyun,” Kenta says sternly. “You’re a dick, but _don’t_ be a dick.”

Sanggyun responds with a niche eye roll. His shoulders sag, though, and that’s indication enough that he’s aware he might have spoken too roughly. “I’m just saying,” he says with a heavy sigh. “Seongwoo deserves a break and if this is what’s going to be his wake-up call, then we should be happy for him.” 

“Hey, Jaehwan?” Jonghyun decisively cuts Jaehwan off from asking the impulsive questions he’s too scared, really, to know the answers to. “Have you decided what you’re going to do yet?” He rubs his neck and it’s apparent that while Jonghyun genuinely wants to know the answer to the question, he’s also making a sincere effort to change the subject. “I mean—about the program being discontinued. Have you decided if you’re going to stay in XSeoul?” 

Jaehwan fidgets, gaze darting from side-to-side before settling anxiously on a distant spot on the wall behind Jonghyun. He laughs—nervous, and he isn’t sure why he feels like he’s about to share a secret when he’s been open, transparent about this since he got here. “I’m not staying,” he says finally. “I never really—I never really even _considered_ staying. There’s too much in Seoul. Family, friends—”

“Shocking.”

“ _Sanggyun._ ”

“—and, I don’t know. It’d be kind of a bummer to give up on Seoul now when it’s finally starting to pick itself back up.” Jaehwan smiles, tight-lipped. “Haha, okay, let’s talk about someone else’s life plans now.” 

Jonghyun beams. “I like when Jaehwan talks like this. He gets embarrassed easily. It’s endearing.” 

“You get embarrassed easily,” Minhyun retorts. “Your ears turn red whenever someone calls you cute.” 

“Confirmed.” Sanggyun grins. 

“Anyway,” Jonghyun continues, significantly stiffer than he was twenty seconds ago, “I was just curious. I’m going back to Seoul too, and so are Minhyun and Sanggyun.” 

Immediately, Jaehwan looks at Kenta. 

“I’m staying,” Kenta says with a bright laugh, and the reaction Jaehwan is expecting from Sanggyun is nowhere to be found; he’s indifferent, entirely unaffected by the response. “I wish I could go with you guys, but not in this life. I have things in XSeoul I have to take care of.” 

They’ve put their destinations out in the open but Jaehwan still can’t shake the churning in his stomach. It feels off saying goodbye to people he’ll, technically, still wander the same plane of existence as; feels _wrong_ saying goodbye to people he’ll never see again without really saying goodbye.

“We’ve still got time,” Jonghyun reminds everyone. “Let’s try to enjoy the next few weeks we have here together.” 

“Hm,” Minhyun murmurs, head tilted to one side and eyes on Jonghyun. 

“What?” Jonghyun asks, _hisses_.

“Nothing,” Minhyun says with a deceivingly sweet smile. “I agree and I think you’re cute.”

At that, Jonghyun’s ears turn a bright red and the table erupts into laughter. For a fleeting moment, it feels like nothing’s changed and nothing’s set to change. The trajectory of their lives, whether they’ll ever really encounter each other again, however ominous and however unknown, whittles itself into nothing and Jaehwan feels his chest lighten, his heart float. 

Jonghyun’s right. They only have a little time left here and it’d be an injustice to their friends, to their family, to _XSeoul_ to squander it.

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

He’s come to associate Sewoon with the waters. 

Kenta with the bar. Sanggyun with Kenta. Seongwoo with the very core of the city. Minhyun and Jonghyun with the quiet corners of it.

And Sewoon with the shore—the shore and everything it entails. 

“I never thought badly of Seoul,” Sewoon says suddenly, and his words float into Jaehwan’s ears like a song. He’s playing with the sand again, picking up fistfuls and letting the grains fall like curtains through the gaps between his fingers. 

Jaehwan has always been a person of very little restraint. He’s always been a little too forward, a little too loud, a little too rough around the edges. That isn’t to say he’s comfortable around everyone; it isn’t to say that he sees the world as a homogenous thing instead of as individuals that he feels individual things toward. 

It’s moments like these: quiet, mundane, with nothing but the delicate hum of existence weaving between their bodies. It’s moments like these that make Jaehwan realize that _falling in love with Sewoon_ was never an adventure nor an arduous process. 

It happened. He realized. And here they are. 

“Oh yeah?” he replies, falling to his back slowly, arms folded behind his head. He closes his eyes. 

“Yeah.” Sewoon hums. “I never had anything against the city. I wouldn’t have minded staying if I wasn’t so scared—back then—of being alone.” 

“You’re not scared anymore?” 

Sewoon hugs his knees to his chest, buries a smile in the too-long sleeve of his sweater. “Maybe not,” he says. “I met someone.” 

Jaehwan opens one eye. “Should I be jealous?” 

“Sometimes you meet people that leave such a lasting impression on you,” Sewoon continues wryly, “that even in solitude, you feel like they’re by your side.” 

“I’m jealous,” Jaehwan confirms, joking. 

Sewoon laughs before repositioning himself until he’s lying against the sand too, shoulder pressed against Jaehwan’s. He lifts his forearm and presses it to his forehead, closing his eyes. 

“Hey, Sewoon.”

“Hm?”

“How do you feel about saying ‘goodbye’ to people?”

“Goodbye?” Sewoon fidgets before relaxing again. “It’s nice. Saying goodbye to people is like a promise, isn’t it? ‘Goodbye for now but I’ll see you again.’”

He’s never once thought about it like that and he’s almost certain that the entire rest of the world thinks of the connotations of _goodbye_ as something permanent. But Sewoon has a way of convincing Jaehwan of the most ridiculous things and the only response he can manage is an affirmative _hm_.

“Is that so.” Jaehwan yawns. “You sure are an optimist.” 

“When you get into a habit of saying farewell,” explains Sewoon, “you start to hope for better things to come with it.” 

Jaehwan closes his eyes again and wonders who Sewoon’s had to say goodbye to. “What’s the happy ending you’re looking for then?” 

Sewoon doesn’t reply immediately and Jaehwan only hears the sound of the waves, grains of sand scratching each other, before he hears the tiny exhale Sewoon lets out. 

“I’m not sure,” he murmurs. “Maybe it starts with you finding me in Seoul.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

The word _forever_ has a lot of complicated implications. 

Together _forever_ is entirely different from _forever_ apart; two polar opposites, two extremes made greater by the use of a single, identical word. 

Jaehwan hates complicated things. It’s why he takes one hearty swig of his third drink that night alone and swallows every last ounce of trepidation in the air to force it into something akin to resolve. 

“They’re ending the program soon,” Jaehwan blurts out. “I, I mean—they’re… it’s going to be over soon. No one’s going to be coming down to XSeoul anymore unless they’re choosing to be downloaded here for, uh, well, forever?” 

“I know I look young and sprightly, Jaehwan, but I wasn’t born yesterday.” Seongwoo snorts and he still looks mildly disheveled from his midday hibernation. He stifles a yawn and stretches his arms over his head once before propping them up on the bar counter and resting his cheek against the open palm of his hand. “Of course I fucking know,” he says. There’s no bite to his tone and the grin on his face is almost convincing.

“Are you still cranky from your nap?” Jaehwan asks. He hopes the shaking in his hands isn’t transferring to his voice. “Want to sleep for another eighty hours?” 

“Haha,” Seongwoo laughs dryly. He looks at Jaehwan—really _looks_ at him and then returns his attention to the rim of his glass, lifting it to his lips and taking a tiny sip. “Why do you think I asked you to find Daniel for me? Because I’m dramatic and stupid and like to pretend I’m the scorned second-lead in an old school Korean drama? Please. We both know I’d be the lead.” 

Jaehwan laughs.

“I don’t have anything to hide from you.” Seongwoo smiles against his glass. “I asked you to find him for me because I needed him to know. And I guess if I’m allowed to be selfish, I wanted to know too. I’ve been waiting for him at the stupid shore for what feels like years. I know better than anyone else that time is running out and I’m starting to think I’ve been waiting for nothing. I don’t mind—don’t get me wrong, I _don’t_ mind waiting. It’d just be nice if I knew it was for something, or better yet, if I knew it was okay to stop.” 

The bar is bustling and Kenta’s been busy all night running to and fro trying to keep the customers occupied. Sanggyun has all but fallen asleep at the far end of the counter, Jonghyun and Minhyun are lost in the crowd (and Jaehwan doesn’t really care to know what they’re doing in there), and Sewoon’s in the back getting ready for his set.

“That’s too much information out of me,” Seongwoo sighs out. “As honest as I am, I know there’s a fine line between being transparent and talking too much. You should really grow a spine, you know? Tell me to shut up sometime. I won’t cry, I promise.”

“You’d cry,” Jaehwan says.

“I’d cry,” Seongwoo agrees.

There’s a clattering at the front of the bar on-stage and Jaehwan’s attention automatically flickers in that direction because he knows Sewoon’s coming out.

“Whipped,” Seongwoo coughs out.

“I just like music,” Jaehwan laughs out noncommittally. 

Feedback fills the room followed by a soft, mumbled apology. Seongwoo laughs too and settles his drink back onto the surface of the counter, spinning his bar stool around so he can lean his back against the edge of the counter. 

“Don’t worry about anything I said. I know the gears in your head are already turning, but don’t worry about it. If you happen to stumble upon a big friendly giant that looks like a Samoyed that’s been shown too much love in its lifetime, then sure, let him know. But... don’t worry too much about me.” Seongwoo pointedly keeps his gaze focused on something else. “The program’s ending soon. You need to sort out how to say your own goodbyes before trying to figure out mine.” 

_Goodbye_ is such a bittersweet word and Jaehwan feels it linger, feels it hang from the tail-end of his heart, heavy as always. 

He’d been kind of hoping that he’d wake up in Seoul one morning and find Sewoon there—that goodbyes, that the _I like you_ s that haven’t even been exchanged would just follow from there. 

The cliché confession, Jaehwan thinks, never really had a place in his relationship with Sewoon. Something natural had always been there from the start and he’s content knowing that Sewoon probably knows exactly how Jaehwan feels, and that Sewoon reciprocates just the same.

But that’s not the case for farewells. 

Seongwoo’s right: Jaehwan needs to learn how to say goodbye. 

“I’ll figure it out,” Jaehwan says, eyes still fixed to the stage. The strum of a guitar sends a pang straight to his heart. “I’ll figure it out,” he says again. “For the both of us.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

There is blackness all around him, and the only thing Jaehwan can manage to summon to mind is that it’s strange how time seems to be sprinting away from him when it’s the only thing he ever thought he had.

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

“I have to ask you something,” Jaehwan declares the second he comes to his senses in his hospital bed. He sits up, doesn’t even wince when the IV tugs at his forearm. “It’s now or never.” 

Daniel looks frazzled, which is understandable considering their conversations have never progressed past patient-client formalities and one-sided venting sessions (Jaehwan can concede that he doesn’t know when to shut up sometimes). “Okay?” he says, _asks_. He lets out a laugh, low and nervous. “What’s up?” 

“The program’s ending soon,” Jaehwan explains. He knows that Daniel knows, but he needs to remind him. “Soon, everyone has to make their final decision on whether they’d like to stay here or go to XSeoul—permanently. I had approximately ten minutes in the void to think about what I’m going to do with myself and the fact that I might literally be in love with someone who’s never going to exist in the same world as me ever again, and while thinking about how miserable I am, I thought, ‘Hey, wow, it’d sure be shitty if I let someone else miss the opportunity of their lifetime!’” 

The confusion does not fade from Daniel’s face. If anything, it only grows. “Okay,” he says for the second time. “Congratulations?” He pauses. “Or, uh, I’m sorry?”

He’s starting to freeze up now that the conversation is heading toward the exact topic that Jaehwan’s been avoiding for the past however-many days, weeks. “Uh,” he says as eloquently as possible. “Just, uh, you know how you mentioned that you can’t go to XSeoul?”

“… Yes?” 

Jaehwan swallows the lump in his throat and, to his utmost chagrin, has to imagine Sewoon singing stupidly sentimental songs by a moonlit window to calm his nerves down. “I respect that,” he strangles out of his throat. “I respect that, but I also have to tell you that there’s someone down there that’s looking for you.” 

This time, the confusion falls from Daniel’s face in _waves_ , replaced almost immediately after with an expression Jaehwan knows all too well: hurt, _guilt_. 

He doesn’t say anything and Jaehwan takes this as a cue to continue. “I’m sorry if you didn’t want to hear this from a patient you barely know, but I—it’s ending soon. It’s ending soon. It wouldn’t be fair to you if I didn’t deliver his message… it wouldn’t be fair to _Seongwoo hyung_ —”

The hurt on Daniel’s face twists into something rawer. 

“Sorry,” Jaehwan says again. “He just… He just wanted to tell you, ‘Don’t worry about me.’” 

“Typical,” Daniel chokes out, and the word is lost in the midst of a breathless, incredulous laugh. He looks away from Jaehwan, gaze fixed to the very corner of his bedside table. The smile on Daniel’s face lacks mirth, and there’s a sheen to his eyes that Jaehwan is pointedly careful to avoid noticing. “That’s so fucking typical of him.” 

“Yeah, he is kind of overdramatic, isn’t he?” Jaehwan muses, teasing. He stills, takes another deep breath before continuing. “There’s… To be honest, I don’t really know what this means, exactly, but the way my friends were putting it, it sounds like something you might need to know.” 

Daniel is quiet, unmoving.

“He’s been sleeping a lot these days apparently? And that has something to do with his physical body and his consciousness and… he might end up in XSeoul permanently or something?” Jaehwan doesn’t say anything about the way Daniel’s jaw clenches. “It’s out of my lane to be saying this, but I think he’d appreciate it if you let him know how you were doing.” 

“I can’t meet him there,” whispers Daniel. He laughs again and it comes out hoarse. “I don’t think I can meet him there.” 

Jaehwan falters, hand hovering over Daniel’s shoulder uncertainly. “You don’t have to meet him there,” he says. “He’d be happy just knowing that you still care about him.” 

“He’s been waiting for so long.” Daniel presses the heel of his palm to his forehead. “God,” he mutters, lifting his head and toward the ceiling and exhaling shakily. It takes a few seconds before he regains his composure, leveling his gaze on Jaehwan and letting out one more exhale. “I was a Floater.” 

He’s heard the term before, maybe in passing out of Sewoon’s lips. The meaning, the implication of the word doesn’t come to Jaehwan immediately, but when it does, too many things click, and Jaehwan’s left to wonder if he did the right thing, after all. 

“I was a Floater,” repeats Daniel. He drops his palms to his knees, fingers curling over them, knuckles whitening. “We were going to go to XSeoul together. I don’t know how it happened, but I got lost in limbo and when I woke up, it’d been weeks and I was in Seoul again.” He wrings his hands, forces a smile. “It’s scary down there, you know? Kind of like you’re wandering down a dimly lit road and that’s all there is to it. You just keep walking and walking and every now and then you’ll hear noises—metal trays clattering, the beeping of the vitals machine, people murmuring faintly but only faint enough to barely make out words.” 

Jaehwan can only nod.

“I can’t go back to XSeoul,” Daniel murmurs. “I don’t know what I’d do if I got stuck in limbo again. I—I have no way of knowing if I’d make it out again.”

“You don’t have to go,” Jaehwan says. “He isn’t asking you to come find him. He just… I think he just needs to know that it’s okay to stop…” He cuts himself off and feels his heart drop. “I think he just wants to know if it’s okay to stop waiting.” 

Daniel inhales sharply, closing his eyes as he mulls over Jaehwan’s words— _Seongwoo’s_ words. 

“I can’t,” he says, almost too quietly for Jaehwan to make out what he’s saying. “I can’t… I can’t tell him that yet.” 

“You can’t tell him to give up on you?” 

“Tell him I’m sorry,” Daniel continues, more confident now. He lifts his head, looks Jaehwan right in the eye and shows a resolve that makes even Jaehwan feel hopeful for something brighter in the distance. “Tell him ‘I’m selfish and I’m sorry, but I just need a little more time.’” 

“Time,” Jaehwan echoes, lips curving into a wry smile. “I think he knows that’s all we’ve got to offer.”

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

‘Going home’ seems to carry a different meaning these days. Every day on his walk back home from wherever he’s trekked to for wasting idle hours, he takes careful note of how differently his surroundings seem to come into view. 

There was once a time when he used to dread looking at the wear and tear, the decaying repose of what was supposed to be _his city_. The frustration must have had something to do with puberty, with growing up—growing up too quickly; he remembers it passing over time, effortlessly, and his closed heart turning into something too wide, too big, too open. 

_Who will love this city if we don’t?_ his mother would tell him, and he’d make a point not to take note of the wrinkles around her eyes or the sag to her cheeks. She was once radiant, long before the Apocalypse. The pictures tell a story completely different from the shell she is now but when she asks him how she looks, wearing a worn-out plastic hairpin as though it is gold, he’s hardly lying when he says _Beautiful_.

 _Do you demolish a home because of its imperfections?_ his father would ask, and he’d make a point not to take note of the trembling in his father’s hands, the calluses budding at his knuckles. In a distant past, his father used to laugh more, smile more, and Jaehwan only knows this version of him through tattered photographs lost in newspaper clippings and memorabilia deemed unsuitable for calamity. 

His parents have too-big hearts for a broken city and it only makes sense that somewhere along the way, he develops one too. 

That’s the beauty of Seoul, he thinks. There are plenty of people running to XSeoul to try and shield themselves from the uncertain future, but the ones that remain are stupidly, foolishly, wholeheartedly lost in their optimism for it. 

And maybe he’s one of them. 

“Jaehwan,” his neighbor greets with a gentle smile, reaching out to clap a warm palm over his shoulder when he manages to stumble in front of his apartment door. “It’s been a while. Been keeping busy?” 

He glances up from his set of keys and dips his head into a quick bow, mirroring the smile as best as he can when he meets her eyes again. “Trying my best to,” he says with a sheepish laugh. “Have you been going to the temple these days? The smog hasn’t been too bad lately.” 

“It hasn’t.” Mrs. Jung has always been kind in all of her interactions, every word uttered a decibel lower than _safe_ , a certain wistfulness to her movements. She hums, contemplative, before looking at Jaehwan intently, glossy eyes looking remarkably clear in that single instant. “Your parents are very lucky to have you as a son.”

Jaehwan fidgets. He’s heard enough in passing from his own parents about the Jungs. They lost their son at an early age—gave him up for the sake of clinging onto a hope of a better life for him, at the expense of loneliness for themselves. _They regret it_ , his father would always say. _But who can blame them?_

He isn’t sure how to maneuver this conversation without coming across as rude, as insensitive, or worse, intrusive. So, he laughs—maybe too loudly, too buoyantly. “You should tell my mom that,” he says with a grin. “She’d think you were telling a joke.” Jaehwan pauses and then continues, more meaningfully, “Your son is lucky too. To, uh, to have you, I mean. I’m sure he’s waiting to be found.” 

The smile on Mrs. Jung’s face ebbs into something more fragile, delicate, unguarded. She drops her hand from Jaehwan’s shoulder and looks away, gaze fixated on a potted plant loitering the hall. “He’s around the same age as you,” she says. “I’d like to think you two would have been good friends if the circumstances were kinder.” 

Tomorrow, he’ll head back to the hospital and spend another twelve hours in XSeoul trying to figure out how to properly say goodbye. He’ll live a life where he doesn’t need to worry about the sadness of the people in his vicinity, the brokenness that their past mistakes hammer into the marrow of their bones. 

But today, he has no other role to fill than that of Kim Jaehwan: just a regular boy with regular parents trying to live a kind life he won’t be ashamed of.

“What was he like?” he asks, if only to let her know that he really, sincerely, does care.

She clicks her tongue like she’s chastising old memories for weighing so heavily on her shoulders. “I wonder what kind of boy he’s grown to be now,” she murmurs. “When he was younger, the first thing he’d do in the morning was press his hands to the window and say _‘I love you’_ to the sun, to the smog, to the birds, to the broken trees, and then to me, to my husband.” Her eyes glitter, and Jaehwan feels something indefinable catch in his throat. “I thought, more than anything, that my son wanted to fly. I thought—I thought by letting him go that I was doing the right thing, that I was clearing the clouds, opening up the sky.” 

Jaehwan doesn’t want to know—not anymore, but his lips move before his mind can force his tongue into silence. “What was his name?”

“Sewoon,” she says, and he feels his heart clench, his entire chest aching. “His name is Sewoon.” 

He doesn’t reply immediately, caught, briefly, in a futile attempt at regaining composure. The breath he’s trying to swallow lingers in his throat and he swallows the pocket of air with a grimace before shoddily constructing a wavering smile. 

“I—” He trails off, and Jaehwan wonders if this is even something he’s allowed to say. “Maybe I can find him for you.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Fate is a funny thing. 

And as he races past an old, beat-up playground with no time to reminisce, all Jaehwan can think about as he slows to a stop, is that everything that is meant to be is meant to be. 

A not-so-sad song he’s heard before, heartbroken neighbors that have always been looking for a son, a boy that’s always been waiting to be found, a broken playground where he once met a boy with no home—

He feels sick. 

A raw laugh tears itself from Jaehwan’s throat and he wonders why his human response in times like this is to search and search for joy. 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

He changes his schedule abruptly, crosses out his usual _TWELVE HOURS_ and replaces it with a _ONE HOUR_ and dodges the questioning looks Daniel and the Developer-in-Charge for the day, Jisung, give him. 

“Only one hour?” Jisung presses while fiddling with the various tubes and wires that entail a successful trip to the city of dreams. “That’s a first. Don’t you, like, you know—do that thing where you get everything out of the way in one go? Change of heart?”

“Has anyone ever told you,” Jaehwan begins, “that you ask too many questions?”

“Asking too many questions is my job,” Jisung replies primly. “You’d be dead if I didn’t.” 

Daniel clears his throat uncomfortably. 

Jaehwan doesn’t want time to kill in XSeoul today. He wants excuses, limited time being the primary one of the day, not to see certain faces, not to confront certain people—certain _truths_ and he’s willing to endure the insistent badgering of his friendly neighborhood medical professionals if he has to. 

“I have plans today,” Jaehwan says.

“Plans.” Jisung doesn’t look convinced, the furthest thing from impressed. “Unlikely story, but okay, sure. _Plans_.”

“Hyung,” Daniel whines.

“Don’t _hyung_ me.” Jisung looks pointedly at Jaehwan. “Don’t do anything stupid. I don’t know what’s going on in your mind but don’t do anything stupid.” 

Jaehwan’s immediate defense mechanism is a string of nervous laughter that comes out as a high-pitched giggle. “What?” he says. “I’m not going to do anything stupid?” 

And the last thing he hears before going under is Jisung muttering, _“Everyone is stupid.”_

His entire day ends up being filled with half-assed encounters. Jaehwan starts it by avoiding telling the truth; that he knows too much, that he broke too many rules, that the only thing he wants to do right this very second is tread the distance between utopia and reality and blur the lines, make them _disappear_. There’s no simple way of telling someone who expects the utmost obedience out of him that he’s stupidly, recklessly in love with a person that may as well not exist and that he’s terrified by that realization. 

Even when he’s cornered Seongwoo at Kenta’s bar, he stumbles. The hour he’s devoted to XSeoul is supposed to be an hour devoted to telling Seongwoo everything Daniel told _him_. For the most part, he gets the message across: a choked-up apology, a request, another apology, and then the truth— _“You know, hyung, it’s hard to believe, but that idiot might still be in love with you?”_ Jaehwan tries to memorize every little bit about the interaction because he wants Daniel to be able to picture Seongwoo’s face in the exact instant when the weeks, months of unrewarded waiting fell from his face and he smiled unabashedly. 

The One Hour Plan is foolproof and ends in a begrudging success. He’d kind of been hoping, toward the tail-end of it, that Sewoon would burst into the bar and force Jaehwan to confront his current largest fear and just tell the truth, but an hour passes painlessly and he wakes up feeling the same loose mattress spring digging into the very bottom of his spine. 

With much futility, Jaehwan opens his eyes to a near-empty hospital room.

The walls are offensively white. His eyes start to sting, start to ache, and Jaehwan wonders aloud if this is what the religious folk call a sign from God. 

“That sounds kind of dramatic,” Daniel comments. 

“Shut up,” Jaehwan groans out. “You don’t know what I’m going through.” 

Daniel, as always, is too nice for his own good. He looks half-apologetic and half-concerned, brows furrowing and eyes doing that _kicked puppy_ thing that makes Jaehwan feel like _he’s_ the one that’s done something wrong, when in reality, neither of them have. 

“You can talk to me,” offers Daniel. He laughs for a second before choking on his own voice and trying, in vain, to come across as more serious. “I mean—ah, if you need someone to listen, I can listen. I’m good at listening.” 

“I told him,” Jaehwan says instead. He shrugs the helmet—the unfashionable statement piece that almost singlehandedly links him to XSeoul—off of his head with a grimace. “Seongwoo hyung,” he clarifies. “I told him everything you told me.” 

Daniel’s like an open book, and as ardently as he tries to hide his emotions, Jaehwan, as dense as he is, can recite them like the alphabet: excitement, fear, curiosity. 

“He didn’t say much,” he continues. “Just picture the sun beaming after a rainy day and that’s about it. That’s how he looked when I told him you wanted him to wait a little while longer.” 

“Thank you,” Daniel says quietly, sincerely. “Thanks for telling him.” 

“Of course,” Jaehwan replies. It’s too easy for him to be happy for them. He’s a sucker for the underdog, for timeless love stories and it’s kind of satisfying, kind of rewarding being the unconventional fairy godmother in one. “You better not let me down. He’s been waiting for way too long to be disappointed again.” 

“I just have some things to figure out,” Daniel explains with a lopsided smile. “Are you okay though? You’ve been kind of off since this morning. I know Jisung hyung comes off as fussy, but he’s really just worried about you.” 

“Sometimes, you just do something really fucking stupid and end up having secret predicaments you absolutely can’t talk to people like Dr. Yoon about.” Jaehwan smiles with little feeling. “Do you catch my drift at all?” 

The expression on Daniel’s face indicates that he doesn’t. And then a few seconds pass and it’s as though he’s forcing to memory all of those passing comments Jaehwan made after waking up from XSeoul. 

“Is this about—” Daniel cuts himself off and glances over his shoulder at the closed door. “When you said there were people you met in XSeoul that you wanted to find here?”

“There’s this person I met,” Jaehwan says, and his voice cracks, wavers when he least wants it to. “God, this is—haha, this is so cheesy, but, I, just… What do you think falling in love is like? See, I always… I always thought it’d be, like, the whole ‘heart beating as fast as a bullet train’ sort of thing where I just want to throw up every single time I see them in a good way.

“But I met this person and since the second I saw them, it just felt like years and years of _knowing_ hitting me all at once and the nerves didn’t jumble into one huge mess. I was calm. I was relaxed. I felt scarily comfortable next to them. So comfortable, actually, that when I realized I was in love with them, it wasn’t—it wasn’t a big epiphany with fireworks and roses. It just… It just felt like coming home.” 

Daniel doesn’t say anything.

“That’s terrifying, you know? It’s fucking terrifying. You find someone that you think you can really be yourself around with no worries, no fears, and they exist in a completely different world. I can’t stay in XSeoul. I don’t belong in XSeoul, but he doesn’t belong here. Isn’t that terrible? Meeting someone you really, genuinely think you’d like to keep in your life and finding out that there’s no way.” Jaehwan laughs, presses the heels of his palms to his closed eyes, dragging them down his face until his hands fall to his lap gracelessly. “I’m selfish. I know better than anyone else that this is a moot point. I can’t ask for more but all I want is more.” 

“You’re just human.”

“In a place like Seoul, you don’t have the time or the energy to think about soulmates or _meant to be_ s or anything of the sort.” He clenches one hand into a fist, doesn’t even flinch when his nails dig into his palms. “I wish we did. There’s this stupid part of me that thinks he might be mine.” 

“He’s a Prisoner then?” Daniel asks, cautious. “He’s… like Seongwoo hyung?” 

“Yeah,” replies Jaehwan. “He chose XSeoul. I’m too scared to ask if he would have made the same decision if our paths crossed sooner.” 

“It’s never really permanent,” Daniel says. “I mean, the download. When people choose to be Prisoners, they’re told straight-up that there are chances that it’ll backfire. They could get lost in limbo like I did or they could wake up one day in Seoul even though they’ve spent however-long thinking their lives in XSeoul were forever. It’s complicated. You shouldn’t tell yourself something’s impossible when it isn’t.”

“How do people wake up in Seoul after choosing to have their consciousness downloaded permanently?” Jaehwan exhales, the tail-end of it turning into a dry laugh. “It’s not common. You and I both know it’s spontaneous, unpredictable—nothing anyone would want to put their faith in.” 

“You’ve never really come across as someone who cared about what other people were putting their faith in,” Daniel comments. He’s smiling and there’s a glint to his eyes that makes it seem like he’s hiding a secret. “What’s this guy’s name?” 

“Sewoon,” he says immediately because as time passes, Jaehwan finds that there’s less and less of a point to keeping these good things to himself. Maybe saying Sewoon’s name out loud will act as a good luck charm. Maybe it’ll spin the fates in his favor. “Jung Sewoon.” 

The smile on Daniel’s lips fades and he sobers, gaze flickering from Jaehwan’s face to the door behind him and then back to Jaehwan. 

“I want to thank you again for delivering my message to Seongwoo hyung,” Daniel starts, rising from his seat and walking to the other side of Jaehwan’s bed to draw the window curtains to a close. “There’s… There’s something I need to show you. But before I can show you, I need you to tell me decisively whether you’re committed to staying in Seoul after the program is terminated.” 

Jaehwan instinctively swings his legs over the edge of the bed, already prepared to follow Daniel wherever he’s about to lead him. “I’m going to stay in Seoul,” he says, with no hesitation. “I can’t just abandon it.” 

“Okay.” Daniel gestures with his hand, beckons Jaehwan to follow as he walks toward the door. “I want to show you something, but I need you to know that there’s a chance that after you see this, you’ll have a limited amount of time left in XSeoul.” 

The conditions seem suspicious but Jaehwan knows that Daniel would never lead him astray. He wants to ask, wants to press further, question his intentions, but he doesn’t. The concern he felt at the onset of this entire conversation slips through his fingertips like sand, and Jaehwan only nods.

“Okay,” he echoes, and then, a second time, “Okay.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

There’s a floor on the only functional hospital in Seoul devoted to those who have actively chosen to have their minds downloaded permanently to XSeoul. 

Some people die of natural causes and indicate in their wills that they’d like to live forever in Utopia. Others die figuratively and stumble into starch white hospital rooms with pain and desperation in their eyes, and they ask for the same thing—to leave their world in Seoul to build a world in XSeoul. 

Those people, according to the information pamphlets Jaehwan’s finally gotten around to looking at, essentially sleep forever. _Sleep forever_ is the nice way to say _fall into a coma_ , but Jaehwan thinks neither are all-too-nice when he stumbles onto the sixth floor of the Seoul General Hospital and is met with eerie silence. 

They pass room after room. Jaehwan catches fleeting glimpses of elderly people, young children, everyone in between sitting at the bedside of the sleeping. There are flowers wilting, some blooming on barely illuminated windowsills. 

“Jaehwan,” Daniel whispers.

He looks away from the vignettes he sees of loss and of regret and quickens his pace. 

They slow to a stop at a door at the very end of the hallway. Daniel’s eyes fall onto the name in the plastic placeholder on the wall and Jaehwan feels his throat tighten with what he thinks might be dread, might be anticipation, might be fear—

Might be _relief_.

“Before Seongwoo hyung and I decided that we wanted to stay in XSeoul together, I worked here. I met Sewoon then as a patient and I volunteered to keep monitoring him after he made his decision.” Daniel looks to the door handle and doesn’t move for it. “Sewoon was—Sewoon _is_ a great person. Seongwoo hyung used to tease me a lot for always listening to the same, sad song. You know the one. I play it all of the time when I’m with you too. Sewoon liked it though. Said the lyrics made him happy, made him hopeful—so I always play it for him when I’m doing my rounds and he’s on my list.” 

Daniel’s always been careful about boundaries, but Jaehwan wishes that that weren’t the case now. He can sense Daniel taking a step back, ready to leave Jaehwan to face this alone, and he _knows_ this is something he _should_ be facing alone. 

“It’d be nice if he woke up,” Daniel murmurs. He shifts, moves to the side so there’s nothing standing between Jaehwan and the door. “Go on. I’ll stand watch.” 

Jaehwan can’t bring himself to say anything, but he knows Daniel understands. He lifts his hand to the door knob, the cold metal sending a jolt through Jaehwan’s veins. He pushes forward anyway, feels the dread fall away from him in succession when he takes the first step in and sees the boy he’s been tirelessly loving in his dreams living and breathing before him in his reality. 

The door falls to a shut behind him and Jaehwan falls against it, back pressed to the surface.

The nameplate outside had read _JUNG SEWOON_ , and it only sinks in now that this is the boy that Sewoon spoke of so fondly and so nostalgically. This is the boy that was afraid of being alone, that ran away from a world too big to find a world too small. 

He staggers forward—one step, two steps, three, four, five, until he’s standing at Sewoon’s bedside with only a hands-width between them. 

“Sewoon?” Jaehwan mutters. His lips curve into a worn-out smile and he reaches out, tentative as he brushes a finger against the slope of Sewoon’s cheek. “ _Sewoon_.”

There’s a lot he wants to say, wants to tell him. _You have a mother and a father that never stopped looking for you,_ he thinks. _You have people that think of you every single day,_ he swallows back. _You were never alone. Wake up and you’ll never be alone._

Time suspends itself and Jaehwan feels lost in it. 

“Sewoon,” Jaehwan chokes out for the third time. 

He clamps his eyes shut if only to hold back what he thinks might be tears. His heart is tight, pained, but swelling, too. The complicated mess of emotions he’s enduring is lessened only by the steadfast realization that Daniel is right: Kim Jaehwan has never been the sort to care about what others put their faith in. 

“You’re _here_.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

While everything changes in Seoul, XSeoul is the same as always.

“Is everything okay?”

Jaehwan jolts, looks up too quickly from the palms of his hands. He almost forgets he isn’t dreaming; almost forgets that there are living, breathing people around him, beside him, looking at him for the living, breathing thing that he is. 

This isn't a dream. This is XSeoul, which is the next best thing.

Hours prior, it felt like his world had stopped, but that’s hardly the case. It keeps spinning—both here and in Seoul, and he’s starting to get dizzy. 

“What?” he stammers out. “Huh? I’m fine. Of course. I’m fine.” 

Sewoon looks at Jaehwan too intently and Jaehwan feels like he’s back in the cramped hallway of his apartment building fidgeting under the watchful gaze of someone who can read him too well. 

He’s not the best with secrets and he never intended to keep any from Sewoon.

“Want to get out of here?” he asks abruptly, and it sounds cliché, sounds like a shitty line from a stupid teen movie about love (but not _really_ love). “Just—somewhere quieter? So we can, uh, so we can…” 

“Sure,” Sewoon says, and he saves Jaehwan the trouble of stumbling through an explanation. 

“Great.” It comes out, unintentionally, as a sigh of relief, but Sewoon doesn’t point it out. Jaehwan’s the first to slip out of his chair, waving to Kenta once before heading straight for the door. 

The anxiety doesn’t fade even after they make it outside and away from the crowd. They walk in silence for a bit, Sewoon two steps behind and Jaehwan going nowhere in particular, only _away_. 

It’s probably somewhere between ‘nearly tripping down a flight of stairs’ and ‘somehow ending up ten feet away from where they started’ that Sewoon finally speaks up. 

“Something happened.” Sewoon reaches out, fingers grasping the sleeve of Jaehwan’s shirt, anchoring him to a stop. “Hyung.” 

“Let’s say I found your body.” Jaehwan’s shoulders are tense and he wants to turn around but he isn’t sure if he can. A breath leaves his body in a shudder and he forces himself to face Sewoon, to look him in the eye. 

The streets are strangely empty when they need to be. Somehow, they’ve cornered themselves at the entry of the boardwalk. Evening is darker these days and if it weren’t this conversation, maybe Jaehwan would have taken the time to appreciate the way the streetlamp glow makes Sewoon seem more unearthly than he already is. 

Sewoon stills, hand dropping to his side lifelessly. “What?” he asks, softly, quietly, in a whisper that might as well be to himself. 

“Let’s say,” Jaehwan starts again, swallowing thickly, “I found your body. In the real Seoul. And let’s… Let’s take this one step further and say that I found your family. Your parents. And they’re looking for you. They’re trying to find you. If that were the truth, what would you want me to do?” 

“I didn’t ask you to look for me.” Sewoon is infuriating sometimes in this way. He’s remarkably calm, doesn’t even seem all-too fazed by this realization, by this truth that he’d once only regarded as a fantasy. If anything, he seems resigned, seems sad. 

“You didn’t,” Jaehwan confirms. “But you wanted me to.” 

At that, Sewoon’s lips curve into a pained smile. “I know,” he says softly. “I did. I _do_. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have—”

“I had to.” He takes a deep breath. “I… I wasn’t looking for anything. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I found you anyway.”

“You didn’t have to,” Sewoon murmurs to himself. “You shouldn’t have. You broke too many rules.” 

“I’m sorry,” Jaehwan says, and his words spill out at a mile a minute, too reflective of the frenetic state of his nerves. “I… I couldn’t just walk away from you.”

The wind is cold, colder still. There is little distance between them, physically, but it feels like miles, overwhelmingly far off. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I had to find you. I broke five hundred rules, I know, but I _had_ to find you and… I’m sorry. Maybe you’re right. I shouldn’t have.” 

“But I wanted you to.” Sewoon wrings his hands together, forces them apart and pins his arms to his side. He looks stiff, and it’s the first time that Jaehwan’s seen his composure crack. “How do you know they’re my parents?” 

“Do you remember a playground growing up?” Jaehwan barely manages to choke out. “An ugly one. Beat-up, worst of the bunch. The only one in town people were allowed to use but no one did anyway because it was dangerous, small, covered in dirt and dust, bent in all of the wrong places.”

Sewoon’s expression flickers from one of confusion to one of understanding, of _wariness._ “I do,” he says. It’s obvious that he isn’t sure if this is going where it should, but he’s being brave and that’s more than enough to fuel Jaehwan’s own resolve.

“Remember a kid that pushed you on the swing every week until he had to go home?” he continues. “About this tall, terrible bowl cut, probably laughed and talked too loudly.” 

“I do,” Sewoon says again, quieter.

“Yeah. That was me. And that kid lived in a tiny apartment with ten other people and had to put up with neighbors that were either aspiring superstitious horticulturists, who, looking back, might have literally been witches—” He turns again, angles his body away from Sewoon. “—or neighbors that were broken-hearted, weary, and always painfully kind.

“The nice neighbors, not the crazy ones with the green thumbs, always went to the temple. I’d see them every morning getting ready to walk there even though it was hours away from where we lived. For as long as I can remember, they’d pack their bags with bruised apples and lopsided pears to offer to a god that wouldn’t pay attention to them.”

“Hyung.” 

“Do you remember it? The only temple still up and running in town. But they’d go every day and when they came back, my mom would peek her head out of the door and say, _‘I’m sure you’ll find him soon.’_ I never asked who _he_ was. I just watched and listened and mouthed along every time our neighbors replied, _‘And if we can’t, we’ll wait for him to find us.’_ ” His voice is wavering again and he isn’t sure why he feels so close to crying. “It sounded like a poem back then, like a lyric from a song. I was just… I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was actually a prayer.”

“Hyung,” Sewoon persists, “stop.”

“Sewoon,” Jaehwan says, “you’re not alone.”

“Stop,” he insists a second time.

“You were never alone. I know it felt like you were, felt like the entire world was out to get you but listen, Sewoon. You don’t need to run from something that doesn’t exist.” He’s pacing now, walking away, walking back, gesticulating too much, voice escalating too much. “There are people waiting for you in Seoul. You don’t have to hide from your loneliness here.”

“ _Hyung_.” 

“I figured it out. Why you always sing the same song that reminds you of Seoul, why you always look into the distance.” The breath he tries to take in feels heavy, feels like a sharp object lodged in his chest. “Don’t you want to be found?” 

This gets to Sewoon. He’s quiet, still, yet Jaehwan can see the tremors, the earthquakes happening right behind Sewoon’s eyes. He shakes his head and whether he’s answering Jaehwan’s question or trying to make sense of things is uncertain. 

“You’re not alone,” Jaehwan urges. “You don’t have to be. Even if you choose not to find your parents again, you don’t have to be alone. I… I know this might be selfish of me, but I don’t want you to be alone.”

“Hyung,” whispers Sewoon.

“I’ll make sure you aren’t alone. If you let me, I’d make sure.” 

“I can’t—”

Their confession was supposed to go differently. Maybe in the comfortable warmth of Sewoon’s too-small lighthouse home. Maybe in the after-hours of the bar, in the glow of barely flickering lights and in the empty hum of _something once happened here_. Maybe on the shore where their worlds first collided, where they find themselves time and time again to exist beside one another. 

Not here, not now. But the words rip themselves from Jaehwan’s solar plexus: “I’m in love with you.” 

Sewoon smiles at that, but it’s wistful and it _hurts_ Jaehwan more than he’d anticipated. “I am too,” he says. “I’m in love with you, too.” 

“I can’t stay here,” Jaehwan breathes out. 

“I know that.” He’s found his calm, his composure again. “I know you can’t. You shouldn’t.”

“What were you going to do?” he asks. “If I hadn’t said anything?”

The lack of hesitation in Sewoon’s answers should be frustrating, but the content is nothing unimaginable. Jaehwan knew coming into this that, realistically, he’d gain nothing but a broken heart—a bittersweet ache to follow him through limbo.

“Nothing,” Sewoon replies. “I would have treated you the same and said goodbye when the time came.” 

“And now?” Jaehwan presses on. “Now that I have said something? Made an idiot of myself being this un-cool in front of you?”

“Hyung.” There it is again, that wistful smile. He makes like he’s about to move closer but he doesn’t, and maybe it’s better off that way. “I can’t do anything but say goodbye.” 

“Don’t say goodbye,” Jaehwan says, the plea contorted into something forcefully lighthearted. He doesn’t want this to be a burden. He doesn’t want this to be a bad memory. “I hate goodbyes.” 

“I made my choice a long time ago, but if it means anything at all to you, I wish I could take it back.” This time, Sewoon does move closer, stopping only when they’re just barely inches from one another. He reaches out, gentle but sure, and takes a hold of Jaehwan’s hand. “But I can’t. I don’t know how and it’d be unfair to make you wait for someone who might as well be a Ghost.”

“Hey, come on, Sewoon,” he pleads. 

“Will you tell my parents that I love them? That I’m doing alright? Tell them I’m sorry.” 

“ _Sewoon_.”

The smile on his face grows wider and it’s peaceful now. “I love you, hyung,” he says, momentarily closing the gap to kiss Jaehwan gingerly on the lips. He pulls away, hovers, just to whisper, “Thank you.” 

His time in XSeoul is running out. Minutes are counting down to nothing and he can feel his consciousness tugging him back to reality. He can hear the clatter of metal trays, clipboards, the same stupid song Daniel always plays—

“We’re running out of time,” he says. 

“You’re running out of time,” Sewoon amends, apologetic. “I have all of the time in the world.” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

When he comes to his senses, his cheeks are damp and the first sight that greets him isn’t Daniel, but Jisung. 

There’s some empathy in Jisung’s gaze, like he has the vaguest idea of what might have happened. There’s some conflict, too, like he isn’t sure if now’s the time or the place for what he had initially planned. 

Daniel’s the first to speak. “I’m sorry, Jaehwan,” he says. 

“We can’t let patients in prohibited areas of the hospital,” Jisung says slowly, and he sounds more apologetic than he sounds stern. “Some areas more than others. It’s—it’s just the policy, the rules. I can’t do anything about it and I have to, technically, give you a punishment.” 

Jaehwan only nods. 

“I can’t choose which punishment to give you either, and Daniel probably told you what it’d be, but I’m sorry anyway that I have to be the bearer of bad news.” Jisung smiles softly. “I’m sorry. Kim Jaehwan, for violating Section 2 Article IV of your XSeoul Participant Agreement, I have to formally notify you that you are hereby banned from utilizing our technology to visit XSeoul. This ban is in effect at the end of your week, which means you still have four hours to say your goodbyes.” 

Four hours. He wonders how many different ways he can say _I’ll miss you_ in four hours.

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

Seongwoo is always groggy these days, quieter than usual, bogged down by physical, mental, emotional fatigue. 

Still, he makes a point to come out to the tinTAP after Kenta distress calls everyone to let them know that Jaehwan’s leaving _forever with a capital F-O-R-E-V-E-R!_ And, for the most part, everyone else is present too sans Sewoon, which might honestly be for the better.

No one comments on the empty stool next to Jaehwan. 

Jonghyun pats Jaehwan on the shoulder like a business acquaintance, stiff as always as he smiles crookedly, composure melting in seconds. “I’ll see you up there,” he says, and Jaehwan thinks he’s come to appreciate the way Jonghyun’s words always come out like a promise. 

“It’s not really a goodbye for us,” Minhyun agrees. “I’m sure we’ll find Jaehwan in Seoul, too. He’s hard to miss. Loud. I think his laugh is going to haunt me in my nightmares for a little while.”

“Dreams,” Jaehwan corrects. “Call them _dreams_ , hyung.” 

“I know what I said,” Minhyun replies primly, drawing a laugh out of everyone. 

“Well, I, for one, will begrudgingly admit that I might miss you,” Seongwoo announces. His eyelids are still heavy, sleep thick in his voice as he stretches his torso along the counter surface. “I don’t know how you managed to it, you gremlin, but you managed to sneak into my heart. I know. I'm disgustingly sentimental. Please hold your applause.” 

Jaehwan snickers. Seongwoo has a knack for easing tension out of an otherwise suffocating room. He almost forgets that this really is the last time he might ever see him. 

“I’ll miss Jaehwan too!” Kenta chimes in brightly, leaning over the counter and easing himself into Jaehwan’s personal bubble with an inoffensive smile. “Don’t forget me, okay?”

“How could he forget someone as annoying as you?” Sanggyun drawls out, zero malice in his tone. Jaehwan doesn’t miss the way his gaze lingers on Kenta for an extra second.

“Just say you’re going to miss me,” Kenta urges with a grin. “I know you’re going to miss me the most.” 

Sanggyun doesn’t even stutter when he replies, “I never said I wouldn’t.” 

The bar’s practically empty at this hour. There are a few stragglers—maybe they’re Ghosts, maybe they’re Visitors—that ease themselves out over the next few hours. Eventually it’s just them, and then Minhyun says goodbye first because his time’s over for the week. He looks at Jaehwan meaningfully before outstretching his arms unexpectedly for a hug. And then it’s Jonghyun, who tells Jaehwan for the nth time that _“This isn’t a goodbye.”_

Seongwoo lingers by Jaehwan’s side, taking a long, slow sip from his glass. “Have you talked to him?” he asks, quiet. “Sewoon.” 

Jaehwan shakes his head. “Yesterday,” he replies. “I ran out of time though. I didn’t really get to say everything I wanted to say.” 

“You have time today though,” Seongwoo comments, raising a brow. “This is it. After today ends, that’s it. You know that, right?” 

“Do I look stupid?” Jaehwan laughs but it dies quick. He pulls absentmindedly at a strip of the dried squid Kenta’s shuttled to them. “Of course I know.” 

“I almost gave up,” Seongwoo says. “On Daniel, I mean. I was so close to giving up, and if it really came down to that, I know for a fact I’d be miserable about it. I mean, look at me. Does this face look like it can handle having a break-up with zero closure? I’m delicate. I need tender loving care, like, constantly.” 

He’s exaggerating and Jaehwan only smiles. 

“We wanted to come to XSeoul together because sometimes, when you’re stupid in love, you realize that the world you were born into might be too small for all of your dreams for the future.” Seongwoo lets out a harrowing sigh. “Sometimes, you’re so stupid in love that you stay stupid in love. I’m glad I met you. I feel like the world dropped you into my shitty life as a gift and said, _Alright, come on. Let’s find you your happy ending._ ” 

“Hyung,” Jaehwan starts to say.

“You’re kind of slow. You walk like a snail. Sometimes, I’m embarrassed by how loudly you laugh—but in a good way.” Seongwoo grins. “I’ll miss you. I know I’m not going to be the only one either. There are people like me, like Daniel, that want a world like this where there are no uncertainties. I look like a risk-taker, don’t I? A real adrenaline junkie? Well, I’m not. I like safety. I like comfort. I like knowing that years from now—if things go right—I’ll be doing whatever I want at whatever pace I want with the idiot I love by my side doing the same thing.” 

“It’s hard,” Jaehwan finally manages. “I know I can’t stay here, but it feels like I’m leaving a really big part of me behind.” 

“Talk to him, Jaehwan,” Seongwoo says. It doesn’t come off as an order or a demand. Jaehwan hears it as a request, as a suggestion, as a reflection—like there are things Seongwoo knows, understands, has experienced, that he’d never want Jaehwan to stumble into without precaution. “Sewoon’s probably just as hurt and confused as you are. He’s human. Sometimes he needs a push in the right direction too. I always thought you’d sort of fall into each other’s company. You guys both have this strange sort of love for seeing flowers grow out of asphalt.” 

“You’ll try and be happy, won’t you?” Jaehwan asks. He stretches his grin wider. “No matter what happens? I won’t have to worry about you, right?” 

Seongwoo smacks Jaehwan’s shoulder lightly, dramatically, and feigns a bashful smile. “Are you worrying about lil’ old me?” he coos. He downs the rest of his drink and swings his legs over the stool, hopping off and gripping Jaehwan’s shoulder to steady himself. “You don’t have to worry about me. You’re not the only hopeless optimist around.” 

“Are you leaving?” 

“I’m going home,” Seongwoo amends. He squeezes Jaehwan’s shoulder, drops his hand. “You get home safe too, alright?” 

The _bye, hyung_ at the tip of Jaehwan’s tongue doesn’t quite make it out. He can only manage a nod, watching as Seongwoo takes his leave and Kenta follows behind to lock the door and then to scurry into the back to clean for the night. 

Jaehwan taps his fingertips against the rim of his glass. “Are you counting down or opting for blissful ignorance?” he asks. 

“Neither,” Sanggyun replies from a few seats away, easily. “Whatever happens, happens. I’m not scared of starting a new chapter in life.” 

“Wow, you almost sounded cool for a second,” Jaehwan says, teasing. “Wish I could follow suit.” 

“Your life isn’t so hard.” Sanggyun gnaws on the end of his straw idly. “I mean, I’d much rather fall in love with a Prisoner than fall in love with a Ghost. Chin up, buddy. This is nothing in the grand scheme of things. It wouldn’t be love if it wasn’t a pain in the ass, you know?” 

Sanggyun blows into his drink through the straw. The resulting bubbles are loud, obnoxious, and Jaehwan only thinks about how grossed out Kenta would be if he were here. He’d probably smack Sanggyun on the arm, voice escalating ten octaves as he chastised him— _“Hey, stop being disgusting!”_

Jaehwan pauses. _Kenta_ , he thinks again. 

“You don’t mean—” he starts to stay. 

“The Developers make mistakes too,” Sanggyun interjects with a half-hearted shrug. “Who knows how it happened? Maybe it was a glitch? We’re living in a digital reality. Who’s to say there can’t be AIs with feelings?” 

It’s strange how quiet XSeoul is today. He figures it’s probably more popular to frequent the city in the nighttime when there are more things to do, when the lights shine brightest. 

The sun’s out, beaming, and even the people filling the streets, moving to and fro, seem to shift in silence. 

Jaehwan almost forgets to breathe. “Oh,” he manages. “I, sorry. I don’t really—haha, fuck, I don’t really know what to say.” 

“He’s an AI,” Sanggyun continues, entirely unfazed. “Started out as your run-of-the-mill Ghost and turned into something—some _one_ —as real as you and me. How fucking terrifying, right? That’s why he has me wrapped around his finger. I don’t know what this guy’s capable of.” 

There’s a bright, unfaltering grin on Sanggyun’s face, something unwittingly forlorn written into the undertones that Jaehwan doesn’t want to acknowledge.

“He _is_ kind of outstanding,” Jaehwan concedes with a reedy laugh. “I should record you talking about him. He’d probably enjoy the praise.” 

“Praise?” Sanggyun laughs too. “He’s a pain in the ass. But that’s kind of how it is. As much as I hate the complicated shit, that’s just how having emotions is. It sucks being human. Makes me wonder how much easier it is being a Ghost.”

“You might be right.” Jaehwan hums. “If I were a Ghost, at least I wouldn’t have to choose.”

For a second, there’s only silence. And then, Sanggyun sighs. 

“I can’t stay here,” he says. “I’ll preface everything I’m about to say with that. I can’t stay here. Not forever. If you asked me if I was in love with Kenta, I’d say yes. Even if he was in the same room and the entire world was listening, I’d say yes. Embarrassing? A little bit. Still, I’d say yes.” 

Jaehwan steadies his hands, stills, and he finds himself holding his breath for reasons entirely beyond him.

“So, am I in love with him? _Yeah_ , of course I am. But does that mean I’d give up everything for him? No. Not at all. And he knows that. He knows I have a home, a family, an entire life in Seoul that I can’t just drop because this world is better, kinder to me. He knows I have people in Seoul that I lost, that I made promises to. And he knows that it’s not that those promises are more important to me than he is—he knows that he isn’t more important to me than those promises are. That he and my sentimentalities are different. They can’t be compared.

“My best friend—Taehyun, not that you’d, _fuck_ , not that you’d even know him—died in Seoul. Not in XSeoul, but in Seoul. In gray, smog-heavy, dreary Seoul, that poor bastard died and left me alone. And I promised I’d be buried next to him. I’m not going to give that up just because things are easier here.” 

Jaehwan parts his lips, tries to muster up the words, the questions he wants to ask. He falters, feels his resolve waver. “Kenta’s okay with this? How is he okay with this?” he asks, and the smile on his face is instinctive but empty. “How does he make himself okay with this?”

“Did you make promises?” Sanggyun levels his gaze on Jaehwan, steady. He lifts a hand, lets it fall, suspended mid-air, palm open and fingers just barely curled in Jaehwan’s direction. “Maybe they weren’t verbal ones to living, breathing people. But if you made a promise to your home that you’d grow in it, that you’d watch it grow, then you need to think about whether it’s really your priorities that have changed or whether you’re letting momentary lapses in judgment cloud your vision of your future.” 

“Of course I want to see Seoul grow,” Jaehwan admits faintly. “But I didn’t—I didn’t expect all of this to factor into the decision. I know. I _know_ that I don’t belong in this city. I belong in Seoul, and it just really hurts that that isn’t the case for everyone. It sucks that my priorities haven’t changed. I’ve just found more to add to the list that I can’t balance for my fucking life.” 

“You really are a rookie,” Sanggyun says, feigned exasperation lathered on thick. The softness in his eyes says otherwise. “What makes you think you’re going to figure out how to balance everything in just a couple of days? You lookin’ down on the rest of us, punk?”

Jaehwan shakes his head. “I’m a stupid optimist, I guess. I only have a couple of days, if you think about it.” 

And it’s true. It’s _painfully_ true. He’s known since the day he first encountered XSeoul that this city wasn’t for him. It wasn’t built for people like him, people with hearts too stubborn to give up and too stupidly sentimental to do anything _but_ root for the underdog. 

The passage of time has been strange ever since XSeoul came into the picture. Jaehwan’s always known at the back of his mind that eventually he’d have to say goodbye to the city. And in his mind, when he’d rehearsed his last days in Utopia, things had been easy, uncomplicated, almost simple. 

Not like this. 

Back then, he hadn’t accounted for heartbreak, for carving out half of his ribcage to scatter in the sands. 

“You don’t have to reduce everything to a choice.” The way Sangyun is looking at Jaehwan is cautious, gaze measuring each one of Jaehwan’s tics. “It’s not about choosing. It’s about timing, about balancing. It’s—It’s about living in the present instead of attaching yourself to your fears of the future and your griefs of the past.” 

“I just,” Jaehwan stammers, words punctuated with tiny bursts of nervous laughter. “I don’t—I don’t want to leave him. How can I just leave him?”

“You’re not leaving him. Don’t be dramatic.”

“But I _am_ leaving him. Maybe he’s leaving me. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that I’m not going to be able to come back.” Jaehwan laughs again, feels the bubble in his throat grow into something sharp. “I know I have to leave. I know I want to leave. But I don’t want to leave _him_.” 

The smile that tugs at Sanggyun’s lips is empathetic, understanding in a way that Jaehwan almost feels sorry about. “You’re not leaving him,” he says again. “Kenta always tells me the same thing. That—fuck, this is so cheesy. That if my memory of him remains, then he remains. It’s that simple. If I want to keep him in my life, then he’ll stay in my life. No one has to do any leaving. No one has to say goodbye forever.” 

He can hear Kenta’s voice repeating every single word Sanggyun has said. 

“It’s not that simple, though, is it?” 

“It’s that simple,” Sanggyun replies. 

“What would you do if you had to say goodbye knowing you wouldn’t be able to come back tomorrow?” 

Sanggyun doesn’t say anything. For a few fleeting seconds that stretch into what feels like a lifetime, all that Jaehwan has to cling onto are tendrils of silence. 

“I’d say ‘I love you,’” Sanggyun murmurs.

“What?”

“I’d say ‘I love you,’” he repeats, louder, lifting his head and meeting Jaehwan’s eyes squarely, smile wide and close to breaking. “And you know Kenta. He’d start crying and it’d be a pain and I’d probably want to cry too but I’d bite it all back and say, ‘I love you. I’ll miss you. I’ll never forget you.’”

Jaehwan swallows thickly, digs his nails into the palms of his hands. He wants to pretend like this isn’t advice he should be taking to heart. He wants to pretend like this isn’t something he has to practice saying in his mind. 

“Is it…” he trails off. He laughs again and he wonders if Sanggyun can tell by now that it’s how he covers up how badly he feels like breaking. “Is it really that simple?” 

“It’s that simple,” promises Sanggyun. “I’m not scared of the day I realize I’ll never be able to come back here. I know that some way, somehow, everything’ll work out the way it’s meant to be because I’ll make sure—we, Kenta and I, will both make sure that in the end, we can say, ‘I’m satisfied with this,’ whatever _this_ ends up being.” He lets out another sigh and slumps forward, eyelids drooping, and the softest chuckle slipping past his lips. “It’s stupid being afraid of heartache. At some point, you just have to ask yourself—

“If I’m too scared to love him in my memories, then do I even deserve to love him now?” 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

He can already feel the timer counting down at the back of his mind when he makes it to the beach, lungs raw and feet aching. It’s just like him to leave everything important to the last minute, to have to physically race against time to get the important things out and into the open. 

“Sewoon!” Jaehwan calls out from the start of the boardwalk. He knows the silhouette of whoever’s at the end of it too well and whether that’s a blessing or a curse is something Jaehwan doesn’t have the time to ponder. He makes his way across, stride quickening with each foot he gets closer to Sewoon. “I found you,” he says breathlessly. Jaehwan hunches over, palms pressed to his knees. “Fuck, I was so scared.” 

Sewoon looks at Jaehwan curiously, the faintest flicker of concern phasing in and out of his gaze. “I wasn’t hiding,” he replies. Where there should be calm, there’s the slightest edge to Sewoon’s tone—and that’s when Jaehwan realizes that they were both scared. 

He stumbles with his words, tongue tied as he says, too quickly, too bluntly, “I’m leaving.” Jaehwan looks away abruptly, jams a hand into his pocket. “I—I have less than fifteen minutes to talk to you. I shouldn’t have pushed it off, but I had to say goodbye to everyone and then I had to think about how best to talk to you without making a complete fucking fool of myself per usual and it’s _okay_ , you don’t have to be polite and tell me I’m not one. I know.” 

“I was scared too,” Sewoon says, words plucked from his lips with careful deliberation. He’s trembling a bit, and maybe it’s the wind or maybe it’s something more. “We never did say proper goodbyes, did we?” 

“That’s—” Jaehwan trails off, taking a deep breath before steeling himself, craning his head to look Sewoon directly in the eyes. He takes one step closer. “That’s the thing. I know you think goodbyes are a promise of the future, but I’m different. Goodbyes are too hard for me, especially when I have to say them to people like you. I don’t want this to be a goodbye. I talked to too many people, complained about leaving, complained about having to leave my entire heart in a city I’d never be able to see again—and you know what everyone said? They said the same thing. _It’s not like that._ It doesn’t have to be like that.

“I know this is where you’ve built your home. But I also know your heart isn’t chained here, that the shackles you told me you’d gotten used to don’t necessarily have to exist. You were right when you said we had no idea, no way of getting you to wake up in Seoul. That’s okay. You want to, though, and that’s all that matters. We can’t know everything. Where’d the fun of life be if we could figure everything out right off of the bat?” 

Sewoon looks stunned as he gazes at Jaehwan, each word sinking into him like an anchor. 

“You don’t have to say anything,” Jaehwan continues, trying, maybe in vain, to ignore the persistent ticking at the back of his mind. “Just listen to me for a second, okay?” 

“Okay,” murmurs Sewoon.

“Okay,” Jaehwan repeats. He takes another step further, lifting a shaking hand to cup Sewoon’s cheek gingerly. “I love you,” he says first. “I’ll miss you,” he says second. “I’ll never, ever forget you,” he says third.

Sewoon closes his eyes as Jaehwan leans in.

“I’ll wait for you,” Jaehwan promises. 

“I’ll find you,” Sewoon whispers back.

Their lips meet and the foreboding ticking softens to a stop. 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

He’s learned to walk through limbo, hands outstretched, fingertips trailing against invisible walls leading him to light. To home. To Seoul.

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

It’s a regular weekday, and Jaehwan drops by the hospital to deliver a hand-made fruit basket to Jisung and Daniel. 

Jisung accepts it warmly before noticing that there are a few bananas missing. “Which I know you took,” he had said while scurrying to his next patient, tone hardly threatening. “But thank you.” 

The ward of the hospital that Jaehwan’s most familiar with is out of sight now. He walks past it, doesn’t think to slow his steps, to peer inside, catch a glimpse of the people who are still stragglers, clinging to their last few minutes in Utopia. 

That doesn’t concern him anymore. 

“I’m going back to XSeoul,” Daniel says, smiling faintly. He almost looks sheepish, like he’s embarrassed by how long it’s taken him to get to this point. “I know I’m an idiot and I’m reckless and sometimes I’m both at the same time, but I’m going to go back to XSeoul. He’s been waiting for me and it’d be unfair of me not to find my resolve when the clock’s ticking louder and louder with each passing second.”

“He said you both had big dreams that Seoul might be too small for,” Jaehwan says. 

“Something like that,” Daniel replies with a laugh. “There’s just something brighter about our tomorrows there than our tomorrows here.”

Jaehwan lets out a low whistle. “Better late than never,” he says with a wider grin, words laced with a laugh. “You’re not scared anymore?” 

“Nah.” Daniel rubs his neck. “I’m more scared of how pissed he’s going to be when he sees me. What do you think, on a scale of one to ten?”

“A thousand?”

Daniel shudders. “Generous of you. I’m praying for a solid five thousand at most.” He stills, lingers. “What about you? What’s your plan?”

Jaehwan hums contemplatively, drumming his fingers against the surface of the windowsill. He stretches his arms out above him as he peers out of the window, fixated on the barely visible setting sun. 

It’s strange how such a gloomy thing fills his entire ribcage with a particular sort of elation. It’s strange how the only thought filling his mind is, _Soon, together_. 

“Me?” Jaehwan asks. “Going to try my hand at the whole ‘waiting’ thing.”

Daniel makes a noise of empathetic approval. “Good company coming your way?” 

After a moment’s hesitation, Jaehwan nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Company worth waiting for.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 _Our only similarities lie in our differences_  
_You became wiser and distant from me_  
_But I see I'm becoming more like you_  
  
_We're too young and naive to see tree rings_  
_Our eyes are blinded by bright lights_

__

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

☆★☆

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jaehwan leans back in his seat and pushes the blinds away, squinting when the sunlight filters in unabashedly. 

“They really weren’t kidding when they said the sun was starting to peek past the smog,” he mutters.

“Hm.” Sewoon squirms in his hospital bed, trying to crane his torso to get a better glimpse of outside. Jaehwan pulls the blinds open even wider in response and Sewoon lifts his forearm to shield his eyes from the light. “It’s a nice look,” he says. 

“What is?” Jaehwan asks. “Me illuminated by the golden glow of natural sunlight?” 

“That’s not it,” he says too quickly, and the smile on Sewoon’s lips does wonders to assuage the instant hurt Jaehwan feigns. “The sun. It’s nice. It makes Seoul look more like…” 

“More like?” 

“More like Seoul.” Sewoon pauses, seems to weigh his words with extreme care. “More like home.” 

So, this is home. A bruised, battered, and broken-down city that’s only barely keeping itself together. The threads are frayed, loose, falling apart as they speak, but someone’s out there tirelessly stitching patches over Seoul’s misshapen framework. And it’s still gray outside if he squints, still foggy and gloomy and a tiny bit dreamless, but Sewoon’s right; there’s a glow to the city that makes it seem more welcoming, inviting, _promising_.

Jaehwan lets out a long, contented sigh. 

“Home is where the heart is,” Jaehwan says with a wide smile. “Home is where the beat-up playgrounds and same-old pseudo-sad songs of yesteryear are.”

“Hm,” Sewoon murmurs again. “You know, I’m starting to think you don’t like my taste in music.”

“Me? It’s unfortunate, but I actually do like everything about you.” 

Sewoon laughs—and it’s a nice sound, something bright that lingers in Jaehwan’s ears even after the moment’s passed. The quirk on Sewoon’s lips softens into something more serene, more resigned. “Do you miss it?” he asks softly. “Do you miss everyone?” 

He does. It’s strange how the small amount of time he spent in XSeoul ended up feeling like a lifetime. Jaehwan still hasn’t decided where the circle begins, if it starts with that stupid big-hearted boy drawing superhero emblems on his face mask in youth or if it starts with that stupid big-hearted boy finding room in his ribcage for more people in a dream of a city. 

“I guess,” Jaehwan admits. He hoists himself up onto his feet and tugs fussily at Sewoon’s bedsheets until they’re pulled up to Sewoon’s waist. The hustle and bustle outside of Sewoon’s room reads like white noise even through the closed door. “I just think it’d be nice to know how everyone’s doing.” 

“I’m sure they’re fine,” assures Sewoon. “I don’t know if Seongwoo hyung is capable of being anything less than okay.” 

There’s a knock on the door then and Jaehwan freezes in the middle of idly fixing the stack of medical papers on the bedside table.

“Expecting someone? Your secret midnight rendezvous?”

Sewoon stifles a smile. “It’s a little early for my daily tryst,” he says. “Can you check? It might be my parents. My mom said she’d be dropping by later.” 

“Yes, your highness,” Jaehwan sing-songs. 

When he opens the door, there’s no one there. Nothing seems out of the ordinary about what he’s seeing: nurses and doctors scampering about, patients taking baby steps with IV drips anchoring them to gravity. 

He’s about to take a step forward when he catches sight of a plain white envelope sitting on the floor beneath him.

 _ **ROOKIE**_

He bends down, balances himself on the tips of his toes as he squats, leaning forward to grab the envelope. The thumping of his heart shifts pace erratically, grows faster—and it must be because a part of him is already wishing for reality to be stretched, for the impossible to be made possible. 

The envelope contains a single post-card with a photo of a too-familiar beach on one side of it. In disgustingly gaudy yellow font, it reads: _HELLO FROM XSEOUL!_

On the other, two lines hand-written in smudged black ink.

 _We’re happy here  
You be happy too_

Jaehwan stands up slowly and peers down the hall. Last he checked, there was no real way of delivering mail between worlds. He tries to catch a glimpse of whoever dropped this off at their door. And he does—just a vignette, in the far-off distance.

 _“Sanggyun hyung,”_ he can just barely make out a taller figure chirruping excitedly, voice growing smaller and smaller with distance, _“after we visit Taehyunnie hyung’s grave, do you think we should visit auntie?”_

“Who was it?” Sewoon calls out. “Hyung?” 

“Oh—I, just…” Jaehwan trails off into a laugh. He turns around and takes one more look at the postcard before moving toward Sewoon’s bed. “Move over,” he says, nudging Sewoon until there’s just barely enough room for the both of them to sit comfortably. 

“Are you okay?” Sewoon asks, careful. 

“I’m fine,” Jaehwan says with a smile, setting the postcard on Sewoon’s lap and tangling their fingers together in the next second. 

Sewoon runs his free hand against the card and doesn’t say anything, only hums. 

“It’s nothing,” Jaehwan continues. He squeezes and feels his world settle when Sewoon squeezes back. “Just got some good news from our home away from home.” 

“I’m happy, hyung.”

The warmth emanating from Sewoon’s body bleeds deep into the marrow of Jaehwan’s every bone, fills him with that strange sort of peace that makes him think, wholly, confidently, that this really is where he’s meant to be. 

“Me too,” Jaehwan replies. He closes his eyes. “I’m happy too.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to **nik** for the wonderful prompts. i had a great and pleasantly challenging time stepping out of my comfort zone to try to produce something that i thought you might enjoy - and i hope you did! thank you to **l, m,** and **k** for beta-ing and for comforting me out of many a creative breakdown. and thank you to the **mods** for your hard work!


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